Capital punishment is neither cruel nor unusual. Justice Neil Gorsuch explained this plain constitutional fact this week writing for the Court in Bucklew v. Precythe. Leftists fumed. “Gorsuch just handed down the most bloodthirsty and cruel death penalty opinion of the modern era,” wailed Ian Millhiser in Think Progress. The decision ends more than two decades of appeals for convicted rapist and murderer Russell Bucklew, who at long last will soon receive his just deserts.
In 1996, Bucklew went on a rampage after his girlfriend tried to leave him. He chased her to a nearby house, where he shot and killed his neighbor before beating his girlfriend with a gun and raping her. Police apprehended Bucklew after a shootout, but he quickly escaped jail, at which point he attacked his girlfriend’s mother with a hammer. For 18 years Bucklew languished on death row. Then, just 12 days before his scheduled execution, he filed a suit to contest lethal injection as “cruel and unusual punishment.” A medical condition involving tumors on his neck, he claimed, might make execution painful.
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