Lawyer condemns horrifying execution

Washington, April 28: The last of four US prisoners rushed to death by the state of Arkansas after intense legal battles, jerked and convulsed in a “horrifying” end to his life, his lawyer said on Friday, as the UN and EU renewed their opposition to the death penalty.

Kenneth Williams, a 38year-old convicted multiple murderer, was the last of four inmates put to death over the space of a week — the first such executions by the conservative southern state since 2005.

“Press reports state that within three minutes into the execution, our client began coughing, convulsing, jerking and lurching with sound that was audible even with the microphone turned off,” lawyer Shawn Nolan said in a statement.

“Execution witnesses indicate that Mr. Williams suffered during this execution,” he said.

He and the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union are calling for an investigation into whether the execution on Thursday night amounted to death through torture. Nolan dismissed as a “whitewash” a comment by Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson’s spokesman that the physical agitation was an “involuntary muscular reaction” caused by one of the drugs used. The compressed timeline for the series of executions was designed to beat an April 30 expiry of a drug, midazolam, used as a sedative in the lethal injections.

Challenges to the executions had been made not only by lawyers for the condemned men but also pharmaceutical companies opposed to their products being used to put people to death. Four other prisoners also meant to have been put to death over an 11-day period before the end of this month won reprieves.

Mr Williams’s lawyers had argued, among other things, that their client should have been spared because he was intellectually disabled.

Mr Williams had been serving a life sentence for the 1998 murder of 19-yearold student.