Supreme Court Backs Ohio Stay of Execution

The Supreme Court on Wednesday turned down Ohio’s request to move ahead with the execution of a killer who has chosen the electric chair over lethal injection.

The court, with three justices dissenting, refused to overturn a stay that an appeals court granted earlier this week to John W. Byrd Jr. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas said Ohio should be allowed to immediately put Byrd to death.

“John Byrd’s case has lingered in the courts long enough,” Ohio Atty. Gen. Betty D. Montgomery told justices in an appeal filed Wednesday.

Byrd, convicted in the 1983 stabbing death of a Cincinnati convenience store clerk, has chosen the electric chair to illustrate what he says is the brutality of capital punishment. Ohio gives its death row inmates that option.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals denied Byrd’s requests to reexamine his appeal on Monday. But the execution was postponed from 10 a.m. Wednesday until Oct. 8 because one judge asked for more time for the full court to study the case.

The dissenting justices said that was not enough justification to delay his execution.

“What does the order granting him a stay tell Byrd--and the millions of citizens in Ohio--about the power, the fairness and the simple common sense of our federal courts?” Montgomery asked the high court.

Byrd would be the first to die in Ohio’s electric chair in 38 years.

“The complexity of the issues raised by [Byrd] are of such scope and magnitude as to demand a careful and exhaustive analysis,” 6th Circuit Judge Nathaniel R. Jones wrote in support of the delay.

Montgomery said, “Though we respect the deeply held views of that one panel member, his suggestion that Byrd’s claims must yet be given a ‘careful and exhaustive analysis’ is baffling.”

Byrd has maintained that an accomplice killed Monte Tewksbury.

The state said that Byrd’s “claim of innocence--like his dozens of other claims raised over the past 18 years--has been rejected by every court to consider it.”