Argument of Speaker
Mr. Speaker: The opinion of the Court in No. 03-6821, Nelson against Campbell will be announced Justice O’Connor.
Argument of Justice O’connor
Mr. O’connor: This case comes to us on certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
The petitioner was convicted of capital murder and was given a death sentence.
The petitioner has severely compromised veins which are inaccessible by standard techniques for gaining intravenous access for administration of a lethal injection.
The weeks before he scheduled execution, the petitioner learned that Alabama prison officials intended to use a so-called cut-down procedure to access his veins if they were unable to access them with a needle.
The petitioner who had already filed once an unsuccessful habeas application filed a complaint under 42 United States Code Section 1983, claiming that use of the cut-down procedure would violate the Eighth Amendment.
He sought a stay of the execution.
The District Court dismissed ruling that the petitioner’s request for temporary and permanent injunctive relief was the functional equivalent of a second or successive habeas corpus petition.
That was affirmed by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
It is true that prisoners cannot use Section 1983 injunctive actions to challenge the fact or duration of their confinement.
Otherwise, they could easily circumvent the procedural and substantive restrictions contained in the federal habeas statute.
But Section 1983 is available for petitioners to challenge the conditions of their confinement.
We have not yet addressed whether an inmate’s challenge to a state method of execution constitutes a challenge to the fact of an inmate’s death sentence or the conditions of death sentence.
We do not reach that broad question here.
The respondents concede that Section 1983 would be an appropriate vehicle for a prison inmate who is not facing execution to challenge use of a cut-down procedure to access his veins for purposes of medical treatment.
We see no reason to treat petitioner’s claim differently solely because he has been condemned to die.
If as a legal matter, the cut-down were a statutorily mandated part of Alabama’s lethal injection protocol or if as a factual matter petitioner were unable or unwillingly to concede alternatives for obtaining venous access, the respondents might have a stronger argument that success on the merits and an injunction would call into question the death sentence itself.
But the petitioner has been careful in his complaint and throughout these proceedings to argue that the cut-down procedure is wholly unnecessary as a factual and legal matter and to propose alternatives that, if used, would allow Alabama to proceed with the execution.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit is reversed.
The case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
The opinion is unanimous.
