Louisiana Sues Its Own Death Row Inmates

"I’ve been hanging around death penalty cases for 25 years ... and I have never seen anything like this."

Apparently, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections is suing all eighty-four inmates on their death row in an effort to prevent them from challenging the state's lethal injection procedures.

Here's how this works:

The Corrections Department’s litigation is a countersuit, filed in response to an earlier lawsuit claiming that Louisiana’s lethal injection procedure is in violation of state law. That suit was filed by the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana (CPCPL) on behalf of death row prisoner Nathaniel Code. It stated that Louisiana had not met the requirements of its own Administrative Procedures Act in creating guidelines for execution by lethal injection. The state procedure ought to specify exactly what drugs should be used to kill prisoners, the CPCPL argued, rather than simply calling for the administration of drugs.

 [...]

Immediately after the ruling in Code’s suit, the Corrections Department filed its countersuit against all death row inmates. The department’s attorney, Wade Shows, told the Baton Rouge Advocate that Louisiana was asking the court “to formally declare—‘once and for all’—that the state’s lethal injection protocol is not subject to the Louisiana Administrative Procedure Act.” Such a ruling, Shows said, “‘means you don’t have to go through the rule-making process….It’s sort of an internal management decision.’”

Full blog post -- with links to newspaper treatments of the story -- here (HT: W. Thomas Webb).

(via).