The state at death’s door

Arkansas has lately conveyed an image to the nation and world of a barbaric place that carries out executions on a speeding assembly line and insists on arming drunken fans with guns at college football games.

It causes me to wonder if those kinds of images amount to two steps backward for any step forward our perennially backwater state manages to take.

I can tell you that Gov. Asa Hutchinson professes to take seriously—more seriously than any governor since Winthrop Rockefeller—the theme of modernizing and expanding the state’s economy. And I can tell you that it was Hutchinson who brought up the potential economic development complications of the death penalty when I interviewed him in December.

We were discussing prevailing socially conservative positions common to Bible Belt states on such issues as same-sex marriage and bathroom use by transgender persons. The context was the potential economic harm to those states—North Carolina, for example, over its bathroom bill. Contemporary business officials nationally and internationally tend to want to locate their expansions in places friendly to inevitable social change and diversifying demographics.

“And I’ll tell you another one—the death penalty,” Hutchinson volunteered.

He explained that European values on that issue differ from conservative-state American ones. He said he had visited during trade missions with European industrialists who were aghast at the exercise of the death penalty in some parts of the United States.

Hutchinson said there was nothing he could or would do about that. He said he is sworn to set execution dates when they are due and, for that matter, he supports the death penalty.

But eight lethal injections in the space of 10 days later this very Easter- inclusive month, an apparent record rate among states, seems to invite unnecessary critical attention.

Hutchinson is reviving the death penalty at full throttle. That’s after a near-decade’s hiatus in Arkansas, one arising from new arenas of legal argument and the uneven availability of vital drugs. That unevenness is partly the result of European pharmaceutical companies wanting no part of contributing to what they see as American bloodthirst.

It was the longtime delay that caused eight executions to pile up. It was concern about the continuing availability of drugs, Hutchinson said at the time, that compelled him to set all the killing wham-bam style before the end of April.

This intended state killing spree— that’s what it is—has indeed attracted national and international attention. It has received harsh editorial criticism in the New York Times, which means little to Arkansas but much to the rest of the world.

Last week I reminded the governor’s press aide of what his boss had said in December. I wondered, considering that, whether the governor was worried about the imagery’s potentially negative effect on his economic development efforts.

This is the written statement the governor sent back: “As governor, I am required to set execution dates to carry out the lawful sentences imposed by juries and upheld by the Arkansas Supreme Court for the eight convicted of capital murder. When you examine states like Texas, Florida and Ohio, with much higher execution rates than ours, it is clear they do not experience a corresponding decline in their economic development efforts. I am confident the same will be true of Arkansas.”

Those are long-established state economies, not chronically underdeveloped ones like ours. But, as a strict economic issue, we can hope the governor will be proved correct.

That won’t change the moral argument. It will remain that some, I among them, believe it numbs senses and devalues human life for a state to kill with a pace that seems indifferent if not eager.

Regardless of what one thinks about the death penalty, we ought to be able to reach broad agreement that a single lethal injection should be a somber, sober, thoughtful exercise—not one followed hours later by another, and then hours later by another, each naturally less somber and sober than the one before.

Meantime, the national sports media made much last week of the Southeastern Conference’s objection to that new law of ours that, until changed at week’s end, allowed concealed handguns even at college athletic events.

There was serious talk for a couple of days about whether the SEC might expel the Razorbacks if the Legislature didn’t carve out an exemption for collegiate sports venues. There was talk at Fayetteville that the law might scare away potential recruits, or at least their mothers.

Fixing the law only under duress— because the implied SEC threat overpowered even the NRA as a lobbying force—may not have fully mitigated the negative imagery.

It’s one thing to get to the right of Europe. It’s quite another entirely to get to the right of SEC football, of Alabama and Ole Miss. But neither positioning does the state’s image or the cause of economic modernization much evident good.