No time to kill

Rather than merely reducing the death penalty to absurdity, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s mad rush to kill seven men in 11 days amplifies it to a point of ludicrous monstrosity.

Starting with two executions Monday, Hutchinson wants to appoint himself the Henry Ford of capital punishment not out of some legal coincidence or necessity, but because the state’s supply of midazolam, one of the drugs with which convicts are lethally injected, is nearing its expiration date. Hence the kind of deadline normally associated with curdling milk is being elevated to a matter of life or death.

Arkansas officials aren’t sure they can replenish their supply of the drug because mounting revulsion at capital punishment — particularly the violent, prolonged deaths that followed some injections using midazolam — has constrained the production and sale of such drugs. Hutchinson’s proposed assembly-line justice draws precisely the wrong conclusion from these circumstances.

The case for the death penalty is often rooted in the particular — the will to punish a heinous crime or avenge an innocent victim. Arkansas’ mass state slaughter would have the opposite effect, revealing the arbitrariness and inhumanity of the practice, and thereby making a powerful argument against capital punishment by avidly carrying it out.