Supreme Court blocks 3rd execution

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court issued an 11th-hour stay for a Mississippi murderer scheduled to be put to death Tuesday night, the third execution the justices have blocked since agreeing to decide whether lethal injections violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The reprieve came less than an hour before Earl Wesley Berry was to be put to death for the kidnapping and murder of Mary Bounds in 1987.

Death-penalty activists and criminal-justice experts said the court's action is further evidence of a de facto moratorium on executions until it decides the lethal-injection issue. The court itself has not declared such intentions.

The Mississippi Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit had both said Berry had raised too late his claim that Mississippi's execution procedures violate the Eighth Amendment.

The justices gave no reason for granting the stay, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito said they would have allowed the execution to go forward. At least five of the nine justices must agree to a stay for it to take effect.

A growing number of states have halted lethal injections because of charges that the three chemicals used may not properly protect inmates from pain. That is the issue justices will consider next year in the case they took in September from Kentucky, Baze v. Rees.