Via Breitbart/AP:

New Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito split with the court’s conservatives Wednesday night, refusing to let Missouri execute a death-row inmate contesting lethal injection.

Alito, handling his first case, sided with inmate Michael Taylor, who had won a stay from an appeals court earlier in the evening. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas supported lifting the stay, but Alito joined the remaining five members in turning down Missouri’s last-minute request to allow a midnight execution…

…he court’s split vote Wednesday night ended a frenzied day of filings. Missouri twice asked the justices to intervene and permit the execution, while Taylor’s lawyers filed two more appeals seeking delays.

Reporters and witnesses had gathered at the state prison awaiting word from the high court on whether to go ahead with the execution.

An appeals court will now review Taylor’s claim that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment, a claim also used by two Florida death-row inmates that won stays from the Supreme Court over the past week. The court has agreed to use one of the cases to clarify how inmates may bring last-minute challenges to the way they will be put to death.

Alito replaced Sandra Day O’Connor, who had often been the swing vote in capital punishment cases. He was expected to side with prosecutors more often than O’Connor, although as an appeals court judge, his record in death penalty cases was mixed.

Go ahead, Ted Kennedy. Tell us again how much of a threat Justice Alito is to civilization and your March. For. Progress.

Or are you all out of breath?

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