PRYOR, Circuit Judge:
Askari Muhammad murdered a prison guard, Richard James Burke, by stabbing him more than a dozen times with a knife made from a sharpened serving spoon, and a Florida trial court convicted Muhammad of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death. When he murdered Burke, Muhammad was already serving a death sentence for his separate murders of a Miami couple. State and federal courts have affirmed his death sentence on direct and collateral review.
On October 21, 2013, the Governor of Florida signed a death warrant for Muhammad, who is scheduled to be executed on January 7, 2014, at 6 p.m. Muhammad then filed in the district court a civil action challenging the method of execution in Florida as cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment, 42 U.S.C. § 1983, even though the Supreme Court of Florida, on December 19, 2013, rejected the identical claim and ruled that the method of execution is not cruel or unusual. See Muhammad v. State, No. SC13-2105, ___ F.3d ___, 2013 WL 6869010 (Fla. Dec. 19, 2013). He also filed a motion for a stay of execution and an amended motion for a stay of execution, both of which the district court denied. Muhammad now appeals to our Court and asks us to reverse the decisions of the district court and to grant a stay of execution. We
On October 29, 2013, less than two months before this federal litigation began, Muhammad filed in a circuit court of Florida a motion to vacate the judgment of his conviction and sentence, which raised an identical challenge to the use of midazolam hydrochloride in the three-drug lethal injection protocol that he now raises in federal court. Muhammad argued in the circuit court that the use of midazolam hydrochloride, the first drug in the three-drug lethal injection protocol that the State of Florida approved on September 9, 2013, violates the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments in the Eighth Amendment. The motion alleged that midazolam hydrochloride does not effectively anesthetize the inmate before the second and third drugs are administered, and, as a result, the inmate is subject to "intolerable risks of pain and suffering." On November 18, 2013, the Supreme Court of Florida stayed Muhammad's execution and ordered an evidentiary hearing on the effect of midazolam hydrochloride. On November 21, 2013, an evidentiary hearing was held, in which Agent Jonathan Feltgan, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement Inspector, Dr. Mark Heath, an expert for the defense, and Dr. Roswell Lee Evans, an expert for the State, testified. After the evidentiary hearing, the circuit court denied relief on the grounds that the dosage of midazolam hydrochloride would render a person insensate and there was no evidence that the use of the drug in the three-drug protocol would result in a substantial risk of serious harm.
The Supreme Court of Florida affirmed the decision of the circuit court that the use of midazolam hydrochloride did not create a substantial risk of serious harm, as follows:
Muhammad, ___ F.3d at ___, 2013 WL 6869010, at *10-11 (footnotes omitted). On December 27, 2013, Muhammad petitioned for a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court of the United States, which is still pending.
On December 23, 2013, Muhammad filed a complaint in the district court raising the same challenge to the lethal injection protocol against Michael Crews, in his official capacity as the Secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections, John Palmer, in his official capacity as the Warden of Florida State Prisons, Pam Bondi, in her official capacity as the Attorney General of
Muhammad also filed a motion to stay his execution, which the district court denied. Muhammad argued that a stay was warranted because the testimony from the state-court evidentiary hearing established that the use of midazolam hydrochloride created a substantial risk of serious harm. The district court denied the motion because Muhammad failed to establish a substantial likelihood of success on the merits. The district court ruled that the statute of limitations barred his claim. Alternatively, the district court ruled that Muhammad's Eighth Amendment challenge was unlikely to succeed on the merits.
Muhammad filed a motion for reconsideration of the denial of the stay, which the district court denied. Before the district court ruled on the motion, the district court ordered the Florida officials to produce documents it disclosed in other state-court litigation challenging the lethal injection protocol. The officials objected to the order, but complied in part. After reviewing the execution logs and other documents produced by the officials, the district court denied the motion for reconsideration.
Based on the documents produced by Florida officials, Muhammad filed an amended complaint and an amended motion to stay his execution. The amended complaint relied on execution logs produced by the Department of Corrections, in addition to the articles about a past execution and testimony from the evidentiary hearing. The amended complaint argued that the execution log of Agent Jonathon Feltgen, an execution monitor, did not chart the amount of time between the administration of midazolam hydrochloride and the second drug, which is "a critical part of the constitutional analysis." The amended complaint alleged that "[t]he failure to accurately and adequately document and detail the events that the monitors are observing demonstrates the trained or ingrained desire to keep secret any perceived problems that occur in an execution," and "[t]his culture of secrecy places Mr. Muhammad at a substantial risk of serious harm."
The district court denied the amended motion to stay the execution. The court ruled that Muhammad "has failed to show a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of [his] lethal injection claim, even
We review the denial of a stay of execution for abuse of discretion. See Powell v. Thomas, 641 F.3d 1255, 1257 (11th Cir.2011). We will grant a stay of execution only if the moving party establishes that: "(1) he has a substantial likelihood of success on the merits; (2) he will suffer irreparable injury unless the injunction issues; (3) the stay would not substantially harm the other litigant; and (4) if issued, the injunction would not be adverse to the public interest." Id.
The district court did not abuse its discretion when it denied the motion to stay the execution and the amended motion to stay the execution, nor will we grant the application for a stay of execution filed in our Court. Muhammad cannot establish that he has a substantial likelihood of success on the merits. The Supreme Court of Florida has already decided his Eighth Amendment claim, Muhammad, ___ F.3d at ___, 2013 WL 6869010, at *10-11, and res judicata bars his federal complaint. The State of Florida has raised the defense of res judicata in both the district court and in our Court. Muhammad has never offered an explanation to rebut the argument that res judicata bars his federal complaint.
When we consider "whether to give res judicata effect to a state court judgment, we `must apply the res judicata principles of the law of the state whose decision is set up as a bar to further litigation.'" Green v. Jefferson Cnty. Comm'n, 563 F.3d 1243, 1252 (11th Cir. 2009) (quoting Kizzire v. Baptist Health Syst., Inc., 441 F.3d 1306, 1308-09 (11th Cir.2006)). Florida law establishes that "[a] judgment on the merits rendered in a former suit between the same parties or their privies, upon the same cause of action, by a court of competent jurisdiction, is conclusive not only as to every matter which was offered and received to sustain or defeat the claim, but as to every other matter which might with propriety have been litigated and determined in that action." Fla. Dep't of Transp. v. Juliano, 801 So.2d 101, 105 (Fla.2001) (quoting Kimbrell v. Paige, 448 So.2d 1009, 1012 (Fla.1984)). In other words, a judgment on the merits bars a later-filed complaint when the following four conditions are present: "(1) identity of the thing sued for; (2) identity of the cause of action; (3) identity of persons and parties to the action; and (4) identity of quality in persons for or against whom [the] claim is made." Brown v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 611 F.3d 1324, 1332 (11th Cir.2010) (internal quotation mark omitted). Florida law defines identical causes of action as causes "sharing similarity of facts essential to both actions." Fields v. Sarasota Manatee Airport Auth., 953 F.2d 1299, 1307-08 (11th Cir.1992) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Under the Florida law of res judicata, the rejection of Muhammad's Eighth Amendment claim by the Supreme Court of Florida on December 19, 2013, bars his attempt to litigate that claim anew in federal court. See Fla. Dep't of Transp., 801 So.2d at 105 ("[A] judgment rendered by a court of competent jurisdiction, on the merits, is a bar to any future suit between the same parties or their privies on the same cause of action, so long as it remains unreversed." (quoting McGregor v. Provident
Because res judicata bars Muhammad from relitigating these claims in his federal complaint, Muhammad has failed to establish a substantial likelihood that can succeed on the merits. The district court did not err when it denied Muhammad's motions to stay the executions, and we refuse to grant his application in our Court. Federal review of Muhammad's Eighth Amendment claim, already decided by the Supreme Court of Florida, is available in the Supreme Court of the United States, in which his petition for a writ of certiorari is pending.
We