THE CONVEYOR BELT OF DEATH
One U.S. state is racing to execute these 8 men in the next 9 days – before a lethal injection drug that’ll help kill them passes its use-by date
The macabre ritual has been playing out for days — the impassioned prison and courthouse vigils, the frantic telephone calls between lawyers and the state governor’s office, a controversial appearance by hollywood star Johnny Depp, and a Death Row kitchen put on notice to provide last-meal requests.
In Grady, Arkansas, on Monday, the two condemned killers waiting in cells attached to the execution chamber were not the standard actors in the morbid drama of U.S. capital punishment. Bruce Ward and Don Davis were due to be the first human items on what has been dubbed the ‘conveyor belt of death’.
Traditionally, it is only defendants and their lawyers who face a race against time, but now Arkansas officials are equally frantic — to ‘deliver justice’ to those Death Row inmates before it is too late.
The deeply conservative Deep South state has nine days to execute eight men by lethal injection before the drugs used to kill them pass their expiry date.
The controversial killing marathon was due to start just after midnight UK time. It was hurried forward because Arkansas’s stock of the sedative Midazolam, a key ingredient of the lethal injection drug cocktail, expires at the end of the month.
Unfortunately for the state’s eye-for-an-eye lawmakers, it is no longer a case of simply buying more. Thanks to a pharmaceutical industry that no longer wants to be associated with legalised killing, and an international backlash against the use of medical drugs for executions, Arkansas may never be able to re-supply itself.
That fact, because of the U.S. constitution’s ban on ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment, could end the state’s ability to put convicted killers to death.
Midazolam, traces of which were found in Michael Jackson’s body after his overdose death, is used for sedation and to treat insomnia but remains a controlled substance in many countries.
It is the latest attempt by America’s capital punishment states to find the perfect lethal drug combination after the electric chair fell out of favour in the eighties.
however, plans to put to death Ward and Davis on schedule faced a hiccup when the state supreme court stayed their executions pending hearings into whether they have been given access to independent mental health experts.
AnD federal judge Kristine Baker placed a stay on all the Arkansas executions. She said using Midazolam — linked to a string of botched executions that left prisoners writhing in pain — could be unconstitutional. Lawyers for the state have appealed the ruling.
The bid to clear the Death Row backlog has reignited an impassioned national debate. Although 61 per cent of Americans favour the death penalty, that majority is shrinking.
The number of executions in the U.S. fell in 2016 to their lowest for 25 years. Increasing cases of wrongful convictions have fuelled hesitancy to send people to Death Row. Weighed down by legal challenges, Arkansas hasn’t executed anyone since 2005.
Johnny Depp has joined the protests in Arkansas, accompanying Damien echols, who escaped wrongful execution over a triple child murder.
Depp said: ‘Arkansas almost put an innocent man to death. I don’t believe that possibility should ever happen again.’
While only two of the eight condemned men insist they are innocent, their lawyers have challenged the tight timetable on the grounds it would violate ‘evolving standards of decency’.
It’s language one can’t imagine they would have used 20 years ago, given the prisoners’ own standards of decency.
Don Davis, 54, was convicted of the 1990 murder of Jane Daniels, shot after he broke into her home in a robbery. Police believe she gave Davis everything he asked for, but he killed her anyway. Lawyers for Davis say he has intellectual disabilities and hasn’t been subject to proper mental evaluation.
Bruce Ward strangled his 18-year-old victim and dumped her body in the men’s lavatory of the petrol station store where she worked. he has since been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
Of The other six due to die, Kenneth Williams, 38, escaped with a life sentence for murdering a university cheerleader. he escaped from prison and killed a warden, later crashing a stolen vehicle and claiming a third victim in the process.
Jack Jones, 52, raped and murdered a book-keeper in 1995, while Marcel Williams, 46, raped and suffocated a young mother after abducting her from a petrol station.
Jason McGehee, 40, was part of a gang who tortured a 15-year-old boy to death for allegedly giving police information about a crime.
Only Stacey Johnson and Ledell Lee maintain their innocence.
Johnson was convicted of slitting the throat of a housewife during a break-in at which her young children were present, while Lee was found guilty of beating to death a female neighbour.
U.S. states have struggled to find drugs for executions since their supply of sedative sodium thiopental stopped in 2011. It emerged it was coming from fly-by-night West London operation Dream Pharma, and eU authorities banned its export.
Arkansas also faces legal action from McKesson Corporation, which makes another of the drugs used. It says state officials who bought supplies lied about what the drug would be used for.
Two other drug-makers are also considering legal action — few companies want to be associated with America’s death industry.
If Arkansas manages to protect its drug sources and execute its prisoners as scheduled, it will probably allow other states to fight off the legal challenges that have been blocking executions.
none of these legal threats, however, may materialise in time to save the condemned eight. As a Supreme Court judge wrote in the court’s 2015 ruling on whether the use of Midazolam was constitutional, we all ‘wish to die a painless death’, but often don’t have ‘that good fortune’.
Convicted killers, he implied, should least of all expect to have one.