WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court Wednesday ruled that the most common method of lethal injection used to execute condemned prisoners is constitutional, a decision sure to restart the nation's dormant death chambers. But the court's splintered reasoning also seems to make likely more challenges to the way capital punishment is administered in the United States.
| AP Interactive |
Capital punishment by state  |
The justices voted 7 to 2 that the three-drug combination used by Kentucky, similar to that used by the federal government and 34 other states, does not carry a risk of substantial pain so great as to violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
"Simply because an execution method may result in pain, either by accident or as an inescapable consequence of death, does not establish the sort of objectively intolerable risk of harm that qualifies as cruel and unusual," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote.
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