Arkansas execution plan unravels after 2 rulings

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Arkansas’ already compromised plan to execute eight men by the end of the month fell apart further Friday, with a judge blocking the use of a lethal injection drug and the state’s highest court granting a stay to one of the first inmates who had been scheduled to die.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen issued a temporary restraining order blocking the state from using its supply of vecuronium bromide after a company said it had sold the drug to the state for medical purposes, not capital punishment. Griffen scheduled a hearing Tuesday, the day after the first execution was scheduled.

Griffen’s order effectively halts the executions, which had dropped to six after Friday’s state Supreme Court order blocking one execution and a federal judge halting another last week, unless it’s reversed or the state finds a new supply of the drug.

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge’s office said she planned to file an emergency request with the state Supreme Court to vacate the order, saying Griffen shouldn’t handle the case. Local media outlets had tweeted photos of Griffen at a demonstration held by execution opponents outside the Governor’s Mansion earlier Friday.

“As a public opponent of capital punishment, Judge Griffen should have recused himself from this case,” Rutledge spokesman Judd Deere said.

The order came the same day justices issued a stay for Bruce Ward, who was scheduled to be put to death on Monday night for the 1989 death of a woman found strangled in the men’s room of the Little Rock convenience store where she worked. Attorneys asked for the stay after a Jefferson County judge said she didn’t have the authority to halt Ward’s execution. Ward’s attorneys have argued he is a diagnosed schizophrenic with no rational understanding of his impending execution.

“We are grateful that the Arkansas Supreme Court has issued a stay of execution for Bruce Ward so that they may consider the serious questions presented about his sanity,” Scott Braden, an assistant federal public defender representing Ward, said in a statement.