Remember Alva Campbell? He was a decrepit 69-year-old inmate on death row, who was supposed to be executed on November 15, 2017. Campbell committed heinous crimes, no question about it.  But he had also been in miserable health, using a walker to get around, apparently suffering from lung cancer, COPD, respiratory failure, and prostate cancer. He had to use a colostomy bag. He had been a two-pack-a-day smoker. He had to take oxygen treatments four times a day. Note the past tense.

When execution day came for Campbell, the execution team couldn’t find a suitable vein in which to put the lethal injection. They tried for about half an hour, sticking him a number of times.  Then the execution was called off. At one point, Campbell went to federal court asking to be executed by firing squad instead, but Ohio law doesn’t allow for that.

Campbell’s execution was re-set to June 5, 2019.  But on March 3, 2018, Campbell was found dead, from natural causes, in his cell at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.  I doubt any tears were shed. But as Adam Liptak wrote in an excellent column on March 6 in the New York Times, can a person be too old to be executed? The U.S. Supreme Court has just agreed to hear an Eighth Amendment challenge in the case of Madison v. Alabama, in which a convicted cop-killer is now so demented he has absolutely no memory of the crime he committed or the surrounding circumstances. Can the state still execute him? Stay tuned.