Courtesy of the SCOTUSBlog, find the Clarence Hill stay application here. The petition for certiorari can be found here. The second question in the petition is pretty dead on and the petition does a fair job laying out the current state of the law. From that petition:

Yet despite the recognition by numerous states and circuits that lethal injection procedures merit review, executions have proceeded in other states - - states which have lethal injection protocols substantially similar, if not exactly the same, as states which have halted their executions. Texas, for example, has executed 21 people this year by lethal injection, fully half of all the executions in the country for 2006. www.deathpenaltyinfo.org (site last visited September 17, 2006). As one judge in a Tennessee capital case cogently observed regarding the wide disparity and arbitrary nature of court responses to lethal injection challenges and their arbitrariness:

[T]he dysfunctional patchwork of stays and execution going on in this country further undermines the variousstates’ effectiveness and ability to properly carry out death sentences. We are currently operating under a system wherein condemned inmates are bringing near identical challenges to the lethal injection procedure. In some instances stays are granted, while in others they are not and the defendants are executed, with no principled distinction to justify such a result.

Alley v. Little, No. 06-5650 (6th Cir. May 16, 2006)(Martin, J., dissenting from denial of a rehearing en banc)(emphasis added). A review of lethal injection litigation around the country demonstrates that courts have developed essentially two methods to handle lethal injection claims. One approach, utilized by the Fourth, Fifth, and (now) Eleventh Circuits, is to deny both the claim and the stay based upon dilatoriness, without any examination of the merits in assessing the equities involved. (See, e.g., White v. Johnson, 429 F.3d 572, 573-74 (5th Cir. 2005); Harris v. Johnson, 376 F.3d 414, 417-18 (5th Cir. 2004), and Hill v. McDonough, Case No. 06-14927 (2006)). The second method, which has been used in the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits, is that a stay is denied, but the case is not dismissed. Rather, the case is permitted to proceed on a fasttrack basis, and if the plaintiff develops enough evidence, a stay is then granted. Patton v. Jones, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 54429 (Okla. W.D. Aug. 4, 2006) affirmed, stay denied, Patton v. Jones, 2006 U.S. App. LEXIS 22312 (10th Cir. Aug. 25, 2006), Patton v. Jones, petition denied, stay denied, 2006 U.S. LEXIS 5379 (Aug.29, 2006); Morales v. Hickman, 2006 WL 335427 (N.D. Cal., Feb. 14, 2006) reviewed at Morales v. Hickman, 2006 WL 391604 (9th Cir., 2006); Taylor v. Crawford, 445 F.3d 1095, 1097- 98 (8th Cir. 2006) on remand, Taylor v. Crawford, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 42949, 22 (June 26, 2006). Thus, in Patton, Morales, and Taylor, a determination on the merits was made in a very limited amount of time, and enough discovery and testimony were adduced to allow meaningful consideration to be given to the plaintiffs’ claims. Clearly, these cases demonstrate that it is possible to litigate and resolve lethal injection issues quickly.