Asked to decide whether the customary method of lethal injection passes muster under the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court said that it does. But despite a 7-2 vote, the court's fractured majority was hardly persuasive, and its conclusions fly in the face of recent botched executions.

The controlling opinion, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and signed by just two other justices, said that a three-drug combination used by Kentucky and most of the 36 death--penalty states (including North Carolina) doesn't violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The question turned on whether the injection method poses an unnecessary risk of pain, and if so, whether the amendment would bar it. Roberts concluded that execution carries an inherent risk of pain and that injection doesn't raise that risk to an unacceptable level.

The two clear-headed dissenters, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, would have ruled against Kentucky, which first injects inmates with sodium pentothal to induce a state of unconsciousness, then pancuronium bromide to paralyze the muscles and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart. Two Kentucky inmates had argued that wrongly administered, the drugs could cause agonizing pain or prolong death, and the court had to ignore chilling recent examples of suffering to reach its decision.

For instance, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush stopped all executions temporarily after it took a second dose of chemicals and 34 minutes, twice as long as usual, for Angel Nieves Diaz to die in 2006. The medical examiner said the needles were incorrectly inserted through Diaz's veins and into the flesh in his arms, causing chemical burns.

That same year in Ohio, it took 22 minutes for technicians to find a suitable vein in Joseph Clark for insertion of a catheter. Then the vein collapsed. Clark's arm began to swell, and he said five times, "It don't work. It don't work." In 2000, witnesses reported that in the Missouri death chamber, Bert Hunter repeatedly gasped for air before suffering "violent convulsions," due to a reaction to the lethal drugs. The victims of murderers typically die painful deaths themselves, but the government can do better than to descend to that level.

Roberts said lethal injection would have to be intended to inflict pain for it to be cruel and unusual, but that more exactly describes torture. The constitutional prohibition surely is meant to apply in a situation where a condemned man would be paralyzed by one drug and suffer terrible pain or suffocation due to the effects of another drug.

In North Carolina, a de facto halt in executions should remain in effect, while courts decide if doctors can monitor inmates on the gurney -- which the N.C. Medical Board reasonably has said they cannot -- and whether the state's top elected officials properly approved the death penalty protocol. Many other troubling issues surround the death penalty debate -- including the risk of imposing an irreversible punishment on someone who turns out to have been innocent.

The legislature, of course, can take the cruel-and-unusual question off the table, support the Medical Board and end any chance of someone being wrongfully executed by outlawing the death penalty in favor of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

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