By Gina Holland
Washington - Convicted triple-murderer David Larry Nelson told a jury he wanted to be sent to Alabama's electric chair. But when his date with the executioner came, the chair was no longer in use and Nelson objected to lethal injection.
Nelson claimed a medical condition would make the punishment unconstitutionally cruel unless special precautions were taken. Because of the condition of his veins - damaged by drug use - it may be impossible to insert an intravenous line in his arm without a type of surgery, his attorneys said.
The Supreme Court takes up his case on Monday, to decide a technical question of whether last-minute appeals from death row inmates should be allowed in federal courts.
Nelson's case prompted legal challenges to the types of drug cocktails used in lethal injections in other states, and justices have clashed 5-4 in a string of emergency appeals from inmates seeking temporary reprieves, on grounds that their own lethal injections would be unconstitutional.
Most recently, the court's five most conservative members voided a stay that a South Carolinan death row inmate had received earlier this month.
Alabama claims Nelson's case is a prime example of a sluggish justice system and the need for limits on appeals. He has been on death row for more than 20 years.
In 1994, he asked a jury to re-sentence him to death for shooting a man in the back of the head as the man had sex with Nelson's girlfriend on January 1, 1978. The woman also was shot but survived to testify that Nelson set up the sexual liaison in a robbery plot.
Nelson also was convicted of shooting a cab driver and beating to death an elderly man, the court was told.
He first asked that his execution be televised, and speeded up. He later changed his mind and sought delays.
Last autumn, Nelson was less than three hours from execution by lethal injection when the Supreme Court stepped in to stop it. He had sought a stay after learning that executioners might have to cut deep into his flesh to administer the drugs.
The US Constitution's Eighth Amendment "prohibits the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain. It permits sentences of death to be carried out, but not in a manner that is more torturous than necessary to extinguish life," Nelson's lawyer, Michael Kennedy McIntyre, told justices in a filing.
Attorneys for Alabama said in court documents that at least 14 states besides Alabama allow so-called "cut-down" procedures to access veins: Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
In Nelson's case, it may be necessary because his veins were damaged by drug use, the attorneys said.
Alabama changed its method of execution to lethal injection in 2002, and is among nearly 40 states that employ it. - Sapa-AP
