Nance v. Ward

In  1993, Michael Wade Nance robbed a bank, and, in the process of fleeing,  killed a person. In 1997, a jury convicted Nance of murder, and he was  sentenced to death. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed his death  sentence and rejected a petition for collateral relief. Nance then filed  a federal habeas petition; the district court denied the petition, and  the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed.

Then, in 2020, Nance filed an action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 alleging  that the State’s lethal-injection protocol was unconstitutional as  applied to him because of two medical issues. The district court granted  the State’s motion to dismiss Nance’s complaint, concluding that it was  untimely and failed to state a claim. On appeal, the U.S. Court of  Appeals concluded that because the relief Nance sought implied the  invalidity of his death sentence, his complaint must be construed as a  habeas petition, and because he had already filed an earlier habeas  petition, it was properly considered a “successive” petition, over which  a district court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction.

The case was decided on June 23, 2022. The Court held that Section 1983 remains an appropriate vehicle for a prisoner’s method-of-execution claim where, as here, the prisoner proposes an alternative method not authorized by the State’s death-penalty statute. Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kavanaugh joined. Justice Barrett filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch joined.

Credit: Oyez, LII Supreme Court Resources, Justia Supreme Court Center, available at: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2021/21-439