“Supreme Court hears Death Penalty Case”

Lethal injection was the grim subject before the U. S Lethal injection was the grim subject before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday. Specifically at issue: whether the drug combinations currently used to execute convicted murderers in some states are unconstitutionally cruel. The issue comes to the court after three botched executions over the past year. In 2008, the high court upheld the use of a three-drug cocktail used by most states to administer the death penalty. The first drug, sodium thiopental, is an anesthetic used to put the prisoner in a deep comalike state. The second and third drugs paralyze and then kill the prisoner. The problem for death penalty states is that the key drug used to anesthetize the inmate is no longer available. Drug manufacturers and pharmacists have refused on ethical grounds to provide it for executions. The result is that states have tried other drugs in executions. The new combination of lethally injected drugs has NOT been approved and is under scrutiny because of recent botched executions. The Supreme Court must now make a decision about if the new drug combination is legal or if what drug manufacturers are doing is unconstitutional.

In Other News The smokey aroma of pulled pork from Boog Powell's BBQ stand did not waft over the crowds Wednesday in downtown Baltimore's Eutaw Street, as it normally does on game days. But rock music blared from speakers at Camden Yards as the Baltimore Orioles and Chicago White Sox took batting practice in an eerily empty stadium with a capacity for nearly 46,000 rowdy fans. Like most days, Wednesday's game opened with the national anthem. John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" played at the seventh-inning stretch. But the stands were empty except for a few big-league scouts behind home plate. For the first time in Major League Baseball, fans were shut out of a game. Two new accounts of what happened to Freddie Gray question the narrative that has fueled protests in Baltimore -- the notion that Gray died as a result of police brutality. The first comes from a woman close to one of the officers involved in the arrest. She told CNN the officer thinks Gray was injured while he was being arrested -- before he was put inside a police van. The second is an account published in the Washington Post in which a prisoner who was in the same van told investigators he thought Gray "was intentionally trying to injure himself.” The new twists to the story come just before Baltimore police are set to release their investigation to state prosecutors, who will decide whether charges should be filed against any officers.