The US Supreme Court [official website] issued an order [PDF] on Thursday granting a last-minute stay of execution just as state officials in Alabama were preparing to execute Thomas Douglas Arthur by lethal injection. The application for the stay was presented to Justice Clarence Thomas, subsequently referred to the court and now stands granted pending disposition of a writ of certiorari. If the writ is granted, the stay will continue up until the time the court reaches a judgment. On the other hand, if the writ is denied, the stay will terminate automatically. Five justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, voted in favor of the stay while Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito stated that they would have denied the application. However, Roberts qualified his vote stating that:

I do not believe that this application meets our ordinary criteria for a stay. This case does not merit the Court’s review: the claims set out in the application are purely fact specific, dependent on contested interpretations of state law, insulated from our review by alternative holdings below, or some combination of the three. Four Justices have, however, voted to grant a stay. To afford them the opportunity to more fully consider the suitability of this case for review, including these circumstances, I vote to grant the stay as a courtesy.

According to Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange [official website], this is the seventh time [WP report] that Arthur had faced an execution date that was called off. Strange criticized Roberts’s statement saying that “there is no ‘courtesy’ in voting to deny justice to the victims of a notorious and cold-blooded killer.”

Capital punishment [JURIST op-ed] remains a controversial issue in the US and worldwide. Last week the Pakistan Supreme Court [official website] blocked the execution [JURIST report] of a murder convict who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2012. The order is pending reconsideration of an earlier ruling that held that Imdad Ali’s condition was not a permanent mental disorder and therefore not legally relevant. Last month the Florida Supreme Court [official website] held [JURIST report] that a trial court may not impose the death penalty unless the jury’s recommended sentence of death is unanimous. Also last month the US Supreme Court vacated [JURIST report] the death sentence of an Oklahoma man convicted of killing his girlfriend and her two children in a case where the trial judge permitted family members to recommend the sentence to the jury. Last week a group of UN human rights experts spoke on the subject of the death penalty and terrorism, calling the death penalty ineffective [JURIST report], and often times illegal, in deterring to terrorism. In September, after a botched execution in 2014 and numerous drug mix-ups in 2015, Attorney General Scott Pruitt [official website] refused [JURIST report] to set execution dates until new protocols have been approved.