Arkansas rushes to execute 8 men before drug expires

After a 12-year interruption in executions, Arkansas plans an exceptional rush in late April, putting eight men to death over 10 days, before one of the state’s lethal injection drugs expires that month.

The governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, signed proclamations last week in his latest effort to restart the state’s capital punishment program setting four execution dates for the eight inmates on death row, between April 17 and 27. Two men would be put to death on each of the four dates.

If Arkansas follows through with that timetable, it will be carrying out the death penalty at a rate unmatched by any state since the United States resumed capital punishment in 1977, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that opposes capital punishment. In 1997, Texas came close, putting eight inmates to death in May and again in June, but not over such a short number of days, the group said.

The hurried schedule appears to be influenced by the expiration of a lethal injection drug in the state’s supply. Arkansas uses three drugs in executions, and its stock of midazolam, the first drug administered, expires in April, the state has said. Its supply of potassium chloride, the final drug in the series, expired in January, but the state has said it was confident it could acquire more.

The rush by Arkansas comes as the number of executions nationwide have steadily declined in recent years, as the 31 states with the death penalty have encountered legal and logistical challenges.

Across the country, officials in those states, including Arkansas, have struggled to acquire drugs to carry out executions, as pharmaceutical companies in the United States and Europe have restricted the use of their products in executions.

The eight men scheduled for execution are Kenneth Williams, Bruce Ward, Stacey Johnson, Don Williamson Davis, Ledell Lee, Jack Harold Jones, Jason McGehee and Marcel Williams. They are among 34 inmates on death row in Arkansas.

Hutchinson, a Republican, has tried for years to bring back the state’s death penalty, which has been on hold since 2005 over legal challenges to the state’s laws and difficulty in acquiring the drugs.

In 2015, he scheduled the execution of eight inmates, including many of the same men scheduled to die next month, saying that they had exhausted all of their appeals. But a state court stopped them because of a lawsuit against the state over its then secrecy law over the source of Arkansas’ lethal injection drugs. The state was then ordered to disclose information about its supply chain.

Hutchinson’s latest effort to restart executions came after the state’s attorney general, Leslie Rutledge, told him that the eight men had no additional legal challenges to their executions.