Mo. executes convicted murderer 2 weeks after ruling

WASHINGTON — Two weeks after the Supreme Court narrowly approved a controversial form of lethal injection, the justices gave the green light for executions to resume Tuesday night in Missouri.

Convicted murderer David Zink was executed at 7:33 CT after a last-minute effort by his lawyers failed as they questioned whether the death penalty itself is unconstitutional — a position taken by two dissenting justices in the lethal injection case.

Thirteen more executions are scheduled before the end of the year — 10 in Texas, which leads the nation in carrying out capital punishment sentences, and three in Oklahoma. Petitions to halt those executions are likely to raise the same issues for the high court.

The Oklahoma executions, slated for September and October, would be the first since the Supreme Court's recent ruling to rely on the three-drug protocol that the justices upheld. The first drug in the cocktail is a sedative, not a stronger barbiturate, that in some cases apparently failed to render the condemned inmate unable to feel pain.

Texas and Missouri, unlike Oklahoma, use a single drug that has not resulted in the same types of mishaps.

Zink's lawyers Tuesday raised the dissent issued by Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Oklahoma case, decided on the last day of the court's 2014 term last month.

The two veteran justices said the potential for mistakes, arbitrary application, long delays and other issues likely render the death penalty unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. They said it was time for the court to consider that broad question.

The court's 5-4 majority disagreed. In an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the court's conservative justices said lethal injection remains the most humane method of execution and the broader issue of capital punishment should be left for states to decide.