Order From the Court

The legal tug of war over the fate of Robert Alton Harris ended at 5:45 a.m. PDT with a terse, three-paragraph opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court. It said in part:

“No further stays . . . shall be entered by the federal courts except upon order of this court.”

“This claim could have been brought more than a decade ago. There is no good reason for this abusive delay, which has been compounded by last-minute attempts to manipulate the judicial process.”

In dissent, Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry A. Blackmun said:

“The barbaric use of cyanide gas in the Holocaust, the development of cyanide agents as chemical weapons, our contemporary understanding of execution by lethal gas and the development of less cruel methods of execution all demonstrate that execution by cyanide gas is unnecessarily cruel.”