Bucklew v. Precythe
2019 United States Supreme Court case
Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U.S. 119 (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the standards for challenging methods of capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In a 5–4 decision, the Court held that when a convict sentenced to death challenges the state's method of execution due to claims of excessive pain, the convict must show that other alternative methods of execution exist and clearly demonstrate they would cause less pain than the state-determined one. The Court's opinion emphasized the precedential force of its prior decisions in Baze v. Rees and Glossip v. Gross.
Background
In March 1996, Russell Earl Bucklew (May 16, 1968 – October 1, 2019) murdered Michael Sanders, with whom his former girlfriend Stephanie Ray took shelter after the breakup of their relationship, then kidnapped and raped Ray. He was sentenced to death by the state of Missouri in May 1997, and failed to have the conviction overturned in legal challenges which had been completed by 2006. During this period, Missouri, as well as several other states, changed its protocol for death sentences by lethal injection to a combination of drugs. Missouri itself had to clear this change through the courts, so from 2006 through 2010, only two inmates were executed.
“Bucklew v. Precythe” enters the record as 2019 United States Supreme Court case. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bucklew, Precythe and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q65062236. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019, 1996, 1968 and 1997.
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