US top court rules lethal injection constitutional

"Petitioners have not carried their burden of showing that the risk of pain from maladministration of a concededly humane lethal injection protocol, and the failure to adopt untried and untested alternatives, constitute cruel and unusual punishment," the judges said in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Lethal injection is the most commonly used form of execution across the United States. Some 53 people were executed in the US in 2006, after the numbers reached a peak of 98 in 1999.

Several death row inmates, led by a pair from Kentucky, had urged the Supreme Court to rule on whether lethal injection violated the constitution.

They had argued that the three-part injection method in which the first part sedates the inmate, the second paralyzes the muscles and the third stops the heart, caused needless suffering in some cases.

If the execution goes according to plan, the inmate quickly loses consciousness and dies in a few minutes. But if the anaesthesia is not properly administered, the inmate can suffer immensely.

In a December 2006 execution, convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz had to be given two lethal doses after a needle missed his vein and pierced tissue instead. Grimacing as he struggled to breathe, his execution took 34 minutes.

After the Supreme Court agreed in September 2007 to hear the case, Michael Richard, 48, became the last person to be executed in the US just hours later as states voluntarily placed a moratorium on all executions. He had been convicted for the rape and murder of a woman 20 years earlier.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg -- one of just two justices to part ways with the majority -- said she was not convinced that the death penalty method avoided needless suffering.

"Rare though errors may be, the consequences of a mistake about the condemned inmate's consciousness are horrendous and effectively undetectable," she wrote, saying that, at a minimum, other lethal injection procedures should be pursued.

"If readily available measures can materially increase the likelihood that the protocol will cause no pain, a state fails to adhere to contemporary standards of decency if it declines to employ those methods," Ginsberg wrote in her dissent, in which she was joined by Justice David Souter.

The executive director for Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), meanwhile, said the high court ruling failed to resolve the broader question of whether capital punishment should be outlawed for reasons of social justice and equity.

"Ultimately, the preoccupation with lethal injection is nothing more than a distraction from the myriad problems currently plaguing the death penalty system," said Larry Cox of Amnesty.

"Incompetent counsel, prosecutorial misconduct and racial, class and geographic bias are just the tip of the iceberg in a system that is flawed at its very core," he said.

"Add to the mix the growing realization that innocent people have been convicted, and may well have been executed, and more and more people are becoming uncomfortable with a system that is costly, ineffective and inefficient," he said, calling for the death penalty to be repealed.

Around two-thirds of Americans favor the death penalty, according to the DPIC, in a country where 3,260 detainees are presently on death row.

In December, the northeastern state of New Jersey became the first state in 40 years to abolish the death penalty.

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