Page:William P. Barr, Attorney General. Et Al. v. Daniel Lewis Lee, Et Al.pdf/2

2 Per Curiam Eighth Amendment claim. That claim faces an exceedingly high bar. "This Court has yet to hold that a State's method of execution qualifies as cruel and unusual." Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 12). For good reason—"[f]ar from seeking to superadd terror, pain, or disgrace to their executions, the States have often sought more nearly the opposite," developing new methods, such as lethal injection, thought to be less painful and more humane than traditional methods, like hanging, that have been uniformly regarded as constitutional for centuries. Ibid. The Federal Government followed this trend by selecting a lethal injection protocol—single-dose pentobarbital—that has become a mainstay of state executions. Pentobarbital:


 * Has been adopted by five of the small number of States that currently implement the death penalty.
 * Has been used to carry out over 100 executions, without incident.
 * Has been repeatedly invoked by prisoners as a less painful and risky alternative to the lethal injection protocols of other jurisdictions.
 * Was upheld by this Court last year, as applied to a prisoner with a unique medical condition that could only have increased any baseline risk of pain associated with pentobarbital as a general matter. See Bucklew, 587 U. S. ___.
 * Has been upheld by numerous Courts of Appeals against Eighth Amendment challenges similar to the one presented here. See, e.g., Whitaker v. Collier, 862 F. 3d 490 (CA5 2017); Zink v. Lombardi, 783 F. 3d 1089 (CA8 2015); Gissendaner v. Commissioner, 779 F. 3d 1275 (CA11 2015).