Arkansas Executes First Prisoner in 12 Years

Arkansas carried out an execution Thursday using the drugs after the state Supreme Court reversed a judge’s order that had halted the use of the vecuronium bromide.

Williams, set for execution at 8:15 p.m., has appeals pending with the U.S. Supreme Court.

For the first time since 2005, the state of Arkansas used the death penalty on Ledell Lee last night. While Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge [official website] released a statement [text] characterizing the execution as bringing closure to Reese’s family, Lee had consistently maintained his innocence for years and was seeking DNA tests to prove the same.

“For the executions that remain, we can expect to see stay motions filed relating to the cases themselves, but for the most part the systemic issues and the issues related to the way in which Arkansas obtained the drugs won’t be present in the case”, he adds.

A reporter for The Associated Press witnessed Lee’s execution and reported the inmate was not visibly uncomfortable while being put to death.

However, the state of Arkansas has argued in favor of its incredibly rapid schedule for executions on the grounds that another one of its lethal injection drugs, midazolam, expires at the end of April.

Two condemned Arkansas killers who admit they’re guilty but fear poor health could lead to extreme pain during lethal injections might become the first inmates put to death in a double execution in the U.S.in more than 16 years.

The state has executed an inmate for the first time in almost in decade, as part of its plan to execute several men on death row.

Two prisoners are scheduled to die Monday, April 24, and one on April 27.

Arkansas executed four men in an eight-day period in 1960.

This combination of undated file photos provided by the Arkansas Department of Correction shows death-row inmates Jack Jones, left, and Marcel Williams.

Thirty-one states now administer the death penalty, and lethal injection is the primary means of execution in all of them.

In earlier legal challenges that eventually failed to stick, the USA healthcare giant McKesson had accused the Arkansas department of corrections of lying in order to acquire the second drug in the cocktail, vecuronium bromide. According to Bloomberg, each of the court’s four liberal justices voted in favor of at least one of Lee’s requests for a stay of execution.

The company said Wednesday that it was “pleased” with the court ruling, and it looks forward “to the return of our product”.

“While other states have increasingly come to the conclusion that the capital punishment system is beyond fix”, he said, “Arkansas is running in the opposite direction from progress”.

The inmates have suffered several legal setbacks as the executions near.

“In preparation for their scheduled executions, Johnson and Lee were moved Tuesday to the Cummins Unit, the location of the state’s execution chamber, a prisons spokesman said Wednesday”.

The death penalty has been abolished in 140 countries around the world.

“The apparent reason has nothing to do with the heinousness of their crimes. the reason the State made a decision to proceed with these eight executions is that the “use by” date of the State’s execution drug is about to expire”.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that states could use midazolam, but that has not stopped its use from tangling up executions in courts or leaving states struggling to obtain the drug. One of his lawyers has criticized the state for rushing through the execution before DNA testing that might have exonerated Lee could be done.