[1] In 2001, the unanimous Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals threw out that conviction, calling the case "extremely weak" and finding Glossip had received unconstitutionally ineffective assistance of counsel.

[1] After a three-justice plurality opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of the sedative sodium thiopental during lethal injections in Baze v. Rees (2008), disconcerted pharmaceutical companies began refusing to supply states with the drug.

[5] Condemned prisoners Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner sued, and the state trial court found the secrecy law unconstitutional.

[5] After executioners had performed the lethal injection, Lockett began to struggle on the gurney, reportedly groaning "this shit is fucking with my mind" and "the drugs aren't working.

[4] At the end of a three-day hearing, U.S. District Judge Stephen P. Friot orally denied the condemned prisoners' request for a preliminary injunction prohibiting the use of midazolam in their executions.

[4][10] On January 12, 2015, Tenth Circuit Judge Mary Beck Briscoe, joined by (future Supreme Court justice) Neil Gorsuch and Scott Matheson Jr., affirmed.

[4] Although midazolam is not recommended or approved by the Food and Drug Administration as an anesthetic, the Court explained that a constitutionally adequate method of execution does not need to meet the medical standard of care.

[20] Finally, the Court found there was no merit to the prisoners' criticisms that Dr. Evans' report overused unreliable sources, such as drugs.com, and that it contained mathematical errors.

"[23] Mocking Breyer's use of statistics, Scalia wrote "if only Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hume knew that moral philosophy could be so neatly distilled into a pocket-sized, vade mecum 'system of metrics'".

Thomas wrote that "the best solution is for the Court to stop making up Eighth Amendment claims in its ceaseless quest to end the death penalty through undemocratic means".

[4] Explaining that the Constitution did not enshrine the standards of the Bloody Assizes or those found in Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, Breyer believed that circumstances have radically changed since the death penalty was restored by the Court in Gregg v. Georgia (1976).

[34] Breyer then described the examples of the conviction and exoneration of Glenn Ford,[35] Henry Lee McCollum (whom Antonin Scalia had previously cited to support his views on the death penalty),[36] and Anthony Ray Hinton.

[45] Because fewer than 2% of counties accounted for the majority of death sentences imposed nationwide from 1976 through 2012,[46] Breyer postulated that the real driver of inconsistent penalties are the local prosecutors,[47] public defender funding,[48] and race distribution.

[52] Firstly, Breyer believed longer delays are cruel, noting that solitary confinement had been criticized by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.

[53] Repeatedly issuing and then revoking death warrants is, according to Breyer, also cruel, noting that, before being exonerated, Willie Jerome Manning,[54] Randall Dale Adams,[55] Clarence Brandley,[56] and Earl Washington, Jr.[57] had all come within days or hours of being executed, multiple times.

[62] Breyer highlighted that, after retiring from the Court, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. testified to Congress that he had changed his mind and now thought excessive delays made the death penalty unconstitutional.

"[19] Sotomayor attacked the credence the Court gave to Oklahoma's expert witness, writing "Dr. Evans' conclusions were entirely unsupported by any study or third-party source, contradicted by the extrinsic evidence proffered by petitioners, inconsistent with the scientific understanding of midazolam's properties, and apparently premised on basic logical errors.

"[69] Sotomayor contended Dr. Evans' testimony that midazolam could "paralyze the brain" was directly refuted by peer-reviewed articles cited by the prisoners' expert witnesses.

[70] The majority erred, Sotomayor argued, by "imposing a wholly unprecedented obligation on the condemned inmate to identify an available means for his or her own execution.

[72] Condemned prisoners should not be required to meet an additional burden of proof, in Sotomayor's view, simply because they face executions that "States hurriedly devise as they scramble to locate new and untested drugs.

[76] However, Governor Mary Fallin ordered the sentence halted one hour before the execution, explaining that the state did not have in its possession the correct drugs.