The New York Times

Tuesday, January 25, 2000

Court Dismisses Challenge to Florida Executions

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 -- The Supreme Court backed away today from deciding whether death in Florida's electric chair is a type of "cruel and unusual punishment" that the Constitution forbids.

The justices had agreed in October to use a challenge to Florida's death penalty law to decide the issue. But that was when electrocution was the only method used by the state.

The Florida Legislature last week passed legislation providing for death by injection unless an inmate preferred the electric chair, and Gov. Jeb Bush signed it into law.

Consequently, the justices today dismissed as moot, or irrelevant, the case they had been studying. Robert Butterworth, the Florida attorney general, had suggested such action in a letter to the court on Jan. 13.

Florida was one of four states that required condemned killers to be executed by electrocution. Now, only three states -- Alabama, Georgia and Nebraska -- have such laws. The issue may return to the nation's highest court in a case from one of those states.

In the Florida case, a condemned killer, Anthony Bryan, had argued that execution in the electric chair violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. He now can opt for death by injection.

Today's order eliminating the case said that the court was relying on the representation by the State of Florida that Mr. Bryan's death sentence would be carried out by lethal injection unless he chose electrocution.

Most of the 38 states with death penalty laws have switched since 1950 to lethal injection as the primary means of execution. Once, 26 states had used electric chairs.

The last man to die in Florida's electric chair was Allen Davis, a triple murderer whose execution in July was marked by a flow of blood from his nose onto his chest. Mr. Davis may also have been partially suffocated before he was electrocuted because of the placement of a mouthpiece.

His death was preceded by problems in 1990 and 1997, when flames erupted from the headpiece worn by two other condemned Florida killers.

The case that the court dismissed today is Bryan vs. Moore, 99-6723.