Bucklew attorneys file new complaint with execution method

Editor's Note: The name of a U.S. Supreme Court case, Glossip vs. Gross, has been corrected below.

Attorneys for Russell Bucklew have filed a fourth amended complaint in U.S. District Court to determine the method of his execution, and the court has ordered the state to respond by Friday.

Bucklew, 47, of Cape Girardeau, received a last-minute stay of execution last year because of a medical condition attorneys argued could make lethal injection cruel or bloody.

Bucklew has been on death row since 1997 after being convicted of murder, kidnapping and rape.

Bucklew suffers from extensive vascular tumors in his face and throat that have worsened the longer Bucklew has been in prison. He is incarcerated at Potosi Correctional Center in Potosi, Missouri.

"Mr. Bucklew has a very large tumor growing in his face, occupying his nose, throat and airway passages and causing him to experience constant facial and nasal cavity pain and pressure, as well as constant difficultly breathing," Emory University anesthesiology professor Joel Zivot wrote in the case. "Mr. Bucklew's airway is also friable, meaning it is weak and could readily tear or rupture. If you touch it, it bleeds."

Nanci Gonder, press secretary for the Missouri attorney general's office, said the state plans to file a motion to dismiss the case Monday.

"What happens next depends on how the state responds, and with what type of filing," one of Bucklew's attorneys, Lindsay Runnels, wrote in an email to the Southeast Missourian.

The complaint gives the state an alternate means of execution -- lethal gas as a "feasible and available alternative method that will significantly reduce the risk of severe pain."

According to media reports, the state of Missouri last used the gas chamber for executions in 1965.

This satisfies a requirement offered by the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision in Glossip vs. Gross, which decided June 29 that Oklahoma could continue to use the lethal-injection drug midazolam. Lethal gas remains an option in Missouri but is not used, Gonder told ABC News in 2012.

Missouri has executed six prisoners in 2015, all by lethal injection. But only one, Roderick Nunley, on Sept. 1, was executed by lethal injection since the Glossip vs. Gross decision, according the Death Penalty Information Center.

Bucklew was sentenced to death by a jury in July 1997. He was convicted of murder, kidnapping and rape in April 1997.

He killed Michael Sanders in Cape Girardeau in front of Sanders' 6-year-old son and kidnapped and raped his former girlfriend, who had been living with Sanders.

The complaint in Bucklew's case argues that any attempt to execute him by lethal injection will "lead to a prolonged and tortuous execution, with Mr. Bucklew hemorrhaging, struggling to breathe and suffocating."

"These vascular abnormalities also create a great risk that the lethal drug will not circulate as intended in Mr. Bucklew's body, leading to a prolonged and very painful death," the complaint stated.

The complaint states execution by lethal injection would violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

"A punishment is cruel and unusual if it creates a substantial risk of severe and unnecessary pain," Runnels wrote.

Bucklew was one of 20 plaintiffs in a case filed in Missouri district court in 2012, but his case was separated because of his unusual medical condition. Since that case was originally filed, the Missouri Department of Corrections announced it was changing its lethal-injection drug from propofol to pentobarbital in October 2013.

"The substance(s) that Missouri DOC uses to execute a prisoner by lethal injection makes no difference in Mr. Bucklew's case," Runnels wrote.

In 2011, the Missouri Supreme Court denied a writ of mandamus from Bucklew, asking for expert services for his medical care. He also was denied such a request in 2009.

bkleine@semissourian.com

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