Supreme Court takes up procedural issues around challenging execution methods and habeas matters

Via this order list, the US Supreme Court this afternoon granted certiorari in five new cases, two of which involve criminal procedure.  This SCOTUSblog post reviews the high-profile religion case of the bunch and provides this very brief account of the two criminal matters:

• Nance v. Ward, involving the procedures by which an inmate must raise his challenge to the method by which the state intends to execute him.
• Shoop v. Twyford, involving (among other things) whether a court must determine whether evidence would help an inmate seeking a writ of habeas corpus and whether the court can consider that evidence before the court grants an order allowing the inmate to develop new evidence.

Though there were less than a dozen executions throughout the US last year, the Supreme Court now will decided three notable death penalty cases this Term on jury and penalty phase procedures (Tsarnaev), on how executions can be carried out when the condemned seeks a spiritual advisor (Ramirez) and now on how condemned can proceed with challenges to execution methods (Nance).  So while less than .001% of incarcerated persons face execution in recent years, about 5% of the Supreme Court’s docket this year involved death penalty matters.