Sounds like an interesting case:
In case where plaintiff claims he is the specified donee of a kidney, that he acquired a property right in it, and giving rise to claims against defendants for delivering it to someone else, questions certified by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit are answered as follows: plaintiff, as a specified donee of an incompatible kidney, has no common law right to the organ, his cause of action for conversion must fail, and as the kidneys were medically incompatible with him, he has no private right of action under the New York Public Health Law.
More importantly, two states, Florida and California, was told to put their lethal injections on hold until problems are handled. Ironically, it was Florida from which Hill v. McDonough came -- the case the Supreme Court took to underline that trivial lawsuits are a concern, but there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hill's case was remanded, quickly disposed of, and he was executed. Hill's concern was proper execution "cocktails" which require care or the prisoner might suffer intense pain if the drugs are injected into a conscious person.
The Supremes held that the principles behind another case involving another foul-up regarding execution proposals should apply here. And, look, another such problem did cause a problem this time -- wrongful placement of the needle led to the inmate appearing "to be moving 24 minutes after the first injection, grimacing, blinking, licking his lips, blowing and appearing to mouth words." This is a problem because "[e]xecutions in Florida normally take no more than about 15 minutes, with the inmate rendered unconscious and motionless within three to five minutes."
The governor put a hold in Florida; a federal judge did so in California, this time because of the protocol issue. The Eighth Amendment requires the state to guard against unnecessary and wanton application of pain. And, the judge here held that though "[n]eedless to say, when properly administered, lethal injection results in a death that is far kinder than that suffered by the victims of capital crimes," all the same, at "the present time ... California's lethal-injection protocol lacks both reliability and transparency." The opinion spelled out some problems as well as suggesting the judge did his fact-finding job with due rigor.
The opinion covers all the ground -- the death penalty is constitutional under current law, the issue at hand is a narrow one of procedure, and the person's whose interests are involved is simply not sympathetic. On this point, the opinion is eloquent and sound:
Nor, finally, does it somehow involve a comparison of the pain that Plaintiff, a condemned inmate at California's San Quentin State Prison, might suffer when he is executed with the horrific suffering of the young woman he raped and murdered. The Court has considered seriously the constitutional issues raised by this case not because of some imagined personal sympathy for Plaintiff but because it is its fundamental duty to do so. As a practical matter, there is no way for a court to address Eighth Amendment issues in the capital context other than in a case raised by a death-row inmate; by definition, the acts of which such an inmate stands convicted are viewed by the law and a majority of the community as so abhorrent as to warrant the ultimate penalty. Lest there be any doubt, this Court has the most profound sympathy for the family and loved ones of Plaintiff's victim.
We continue to tinker with death. The Hill case, if nothing else, allowed lower courts some discretion to deal with the clear problems with this method of execution. Tinker tinker.