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Why the Supreme Court is fighting over deadly gas and firing squads

A man looks at a painting by Dmity Kolistratov "Firing Squad" (2016). | Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images Last week, the Supreme Court handed an unusual — if temporary — victory to an Alabama man on death row. As Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, writes, this is the first time in over five years that this Court refused to “un-block an execution that a lower court had put on hold,” at least in a case that arose on the Court’s enigmatic shadow docket. The case, Lovelace v. Lee, involves an utterly ghoulish legal dispute. Alabama was scheduled to execute Jeffery Lee, the in...