It was a big week for the United States Supreme Court - the Justices not only heard oral arguments in potentially landmark cases challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection and mandatory voter identification, but the Court building also served as the site of a massive demonstration calling for a shutdown of Guantanamo Bay.

The Court returned from a winter break on Monday and began the year by hearing Baze v. Rees, a case brought by two inmates on death row in Kentucky. They contend that the three-drug combination used in executions in all but one of the 36 states that still have the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

In 1977, when death by electric chair was the norm, the chief medical examiner in Oklahoma developed the drug cocktail in an attempt to make executions more "humane." It consists of a barbiturate to make the individual unconscious, pancuronium bromide to paralyze muscles and stop breathing, and potassium chloride to stop the heart. Essentially, this thirty-year-old dosage combination suffocates people to death, only the drug that is supposed to make the condemned unconscious often doesn’t work. So they are conscious of the suffocation as it comes on, but unable to move or speak to communicate about it.

Opponents of the death penalty were hopeful when the Court agreed to hear the case challenging this method last fall – they essentially halted all executions in the country by granting stays to any prisoner that appealed to them. Some saw this is a hint that perhaps they would strike down this method and, for all intents and purposes, stop the death penalty for the foreseeable future. But a lot of those hopes were dashed by the reactions of the Justices during oral argument.

Justices Scalia and Roberts expressed expected opposition, but the usually liberal Justice Breyer was unexpectedly skeptical, expressing doubt that any other method of execution would be any less painful or less prone to human error. And even Justice Stevens, the Court’s most liberal Justice, conceded that the state should probably win if the issue was how well it administered the current protocol, leaving open the question about whether the constitutionality of the method itself was really being examined at all.

You can read the entire transcript of the arguments here, or download them and hear them for yourself here.

The Justices also expressed skepticism at a challenge to an Indiana law requiring all voters present valid, government-issued IDs at the polls in order to cast a vote. The challengers – the ACLU and the Indiana Democratic Party – contend that the ID requirement is an undue burden on the right to vote because the justification of voter fraud is not enough of a problem to need such a drastic solution. They claim that it will disproportionately affect poor and minority voters (who usually vote for the Democratic Party) who are less likely than more affluent white voters to have drivers’ licenses and passports.

The Justices seemed dismissive not only of this argument, but of the entire case in general. Courts are only supposed to hear cases brought by parties who are actually harmed, but this suit was brought before the law could ever be implemented. So, technically, no one has ever been harmed by it. The issue is a deeply partisan one, of course, but the Justices apparently managed to ignore this fact.

And finally, the week rounded out with a massive protest, both inside and outside the Court, against the torture of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. Police arrested 80 people without incident.

Ironically, the protest overshadowed the fact that the Court ruled on that very day that the Guantanamo detainees could not sue Pentagon officers and military officials for torturing them.