Understanding the Court System

Understanding the Court System Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Understanding the Court System It is not easy to understand the United States’ court system because of the multiple layers authority, jurisdiction, county, state and federal boundaries. Different individuals who are employed in these multiple layers such as the judges, clerks and advocates play different roles that make the understanding of the American Court a hard task. To add to the confusion are the various state and federal laws and regulations, court processes, and types of cases that makes it hard for one to describe the roles court play in administering justice. This paper will try to explain these roles by using the recent completed cases. In U.S. two concepts from the United States Constitution: separation of powers and federalism, influence the organizational structure of the courts. The first concept, the federal court system acts as an intermediary between the executive and legislature where the judicial branch judges the constitutionality of executive and legislation procedures and policies. The second concept resulted in the establishment of two independent court systems; federal and state court systems. However, despite their independence, the federal court system checks on case laws and decisions in state courts where the U.S. Supreme Court is the last resort that reviews the decisions from state or state Supreme Courts. CASE Glossip v. Gross Lethal Injection Case Facts of the case On April 29, 2014, Oklahoma used the three-drug lethal injection procedure to execute Clayton Locket. The procedure was expected to render Locket unconscious and die but it did not go well because he woke up after being injected and died 40 minutes later. Due to this incident, Oklahoma suspended all executions until the incident was fully investigated and if possible adopt new policies that will ensure that the injection is successful. The new adopted protocol had four alternative drug combinations where midazolam as an initial drug which the previous protocol that was used in executing Lockett (Glossip v. Gross, n.d). Glossip and other 20 death row inmates moved to court to use state officials by arguing that "using midazolam as the initial drug in the execution protocol violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment," (Glossip v. Gross, n.d). They also moved for a preliminary injunction that was to stop Oklahoma from continuing its executions. They were denied the injunction by a federal district based on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not provide sufficient evidence and have failed to provide a "known and available" option to the drug. This was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. January 15, 2015, the Supreme Court also denied the petition a writ of Certiorari and Charles Warner was executed. After Warner’s execution, Richard Glossip and other death row inmates petitioned the Court for the second time where they challenged the use of the midazolam drug in the execution protocol arguing that it cannot not reliably render one unconscious even if it is administered properly bef...