A stay of execution is a court order to temporarily suspend the execution of a court judgment or other court order. The word "execution" does not always mean the

death penalty Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...

. It refers to the imposition of whatever judgment is being stayed and is similar to an

injunction An injunction is a legal and equitable remedy in the form of a special court order that compels a party to do or refrain from specific acts. ("The court of appeals ... has exclusive jurisdiction to enjoin, set aside, suspend (in whole or in pa ...

. A stay can be granted automatically by operation of law or by order of a court, either following a motion or by agreement of the parties. If a party

appeal In law, an appeal is the process in which cases are reviewed by a higher authority, where parties request a formal change to an official decision. Appeals function both as a process for error correction as well as a process of clarifying and ...

s a decision, any judgment issued by the original court may be stayed until the appeal is resolved.

Death penalty stays

In cases that the

has been imposed, a stay of execution is often sought to defer the

execution Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the State (polity), state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to ...

of the convicted person. That may occur if new evidence is discovered to

exonerate Exoneration occurs when the conviction for a crime is reversed, either through demonstration of innocence, a flaw in the conviction, or otherwise. Attempts to exonerate convicts are particularly controversial in death penalty cases, especially w ...

the convicted person or in attempts to have the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. In the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, all death sentences are automatically stayed pending a

direct review Judicial review is a process under which executive, legislative and administrative actions are subject to review by the judiciary. A court with authority for judicial review may invalidate laws, acts and governmental actions that are incompa ...

by an appeals court. If the death sentence is found to have been legally sound, the stay is lifted. One example of a stay of execution in the death penalty context was the

James Autry James David Autry (September 27, 1954 – March 14, 1984

Joseph Paul Franklin Joseph Paul Franklin (born James Clayton Vaughn Jr.; April 13, 1950 – November 20, 2013) was an Americans, American White supremacy, white supremacist and serial killer who engaged in a murder spree spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s. Fr ...

that use of the drug phenobarbital in a lethal injection would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The following day, US Supreme Court upheld an appeal court's decision to lift the stay of execution. Franklin was put to death on November 20, 2013. Another case is the case of

Kho Jabing Kho Jabing (4 January 1984 – 20 May 2016), later in life Muhammad Kho Abdullah, was a Malaysian of mixed Chinese and Iban descent from Sarawak, Malaysia, who partnered with a friend to rob and murder a Chinese construction worker named Cao Ru ...

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

. Kho, who was a Malaysian detained on

death row Death row, also known as condemned row, is a place in a prison that houses inmates awaiting Capital punishment, execution after being convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death. The term is also used figuratively to describe the state of ...

for the

capital murder Capital murder was a statutory offence of aggravated murder in Great Britain, and Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland, which was later adopted as a legal provision to define certain forms of aggravated murder in the United States. In som ...

of Chinese national Cao Ruyin, received a death warrant which ordered that his execution was to be carried out on 6 November 2015. Through his lawyer, Kho managed to suspend his execution while pending a newly filed last-minute appeal against his sentence. Earlier on, in 2013, while he had spent three years on death row for killing Cao Ruyin during a robbery in 2008, the changes to the law had officially abolished the mandatory death penalty for murder committed with no intention to kill and included an alternative sentence of life imprisonment with

caning Caning is a form of corporal punishment consisting of a number of hits (known as "strokes" or "cuts") with a single Stick-fighting, cane usually made of rattan, generally applied to the offender's bare or clothed buttocks (see spanking) or ha ...

for such a crime, which gave all death row inmates to apply to reduce their sentences. Kho was eligible of such an entitlement and received a life sentence with 24 strokes of the cane. However, he was once again sentenced to death upon the prosecution's appeal to the higher courts of Singapore in early 2015, which was narrowly allowed by a majority vote of 3-2, as the majority of the judges found that the manner of killing demonstrated both viciousness and a blatant disregard for human life, which would be more appropriate to order Kho to be hanged rather than having him jailed for life. After the suspension of Kho's execution, a few months later, in April 2016, Kho lost his appeal, as the Court of Appeal found there is little new material and evidence for the court to conclude that there is a miscarriage of justice in Kho's case when they made the decision to sentence the Malaysian to death, and not convincing enough for the court to reopen the concluded 2015 criminal appeal, which was coupled by the lawyers rehashing the old arguments made in the earlier court proceedings against him. Later, a new date was set for the execution to take place, and it was released, with the death warrant ordering that Kho should be executed at dawn on 20 May 2016. However, this execution was once again postponed by another stay of execution granted in view of an appeal filed the night before Kho's execution. The appeal was thrown out the next morning since the court felt that the defence was just rehashing their old arguments, which the court believed amounted to an abuse of the court, which led to the judges to strongly and critically reprimand Kho's lawyers for their conduct. Shortly after the rejection of his final appeal, Kho was then hanged on the afternoon of 20 May 2016.

References

Capital punishment {{law-term-stub