Arkansas in double execution

AFTER going nearly 12 years without executing an inmate, the US state of Arkansas has executed three in a few days, including two in one night.

Jack Jones and Marcel Williams received lethal injections on Monday night, roughly three hours apart. It is the first double execution to be carried out in the US since 2000.

While Jones, 52, was executed on schedule, attorneys for Williams, 46, convinced a federal judge minutes later to briefly delay his execution over concerns about how the earlier one was carried out. They claimed Jones “was moving his lips and gulping for air”, an account the state’s attorney general denied. But the judge lifted her stay about an hour later and Williams was pronounced dead at 10.33pm.

In the emergency filing, Williams’ attorneys wrote that officials spent 45 minutes trying to place an IV line in Jones’ neck before placing it elsewhere. It argued that Williams, who weighed 28st 80z, could have faced a “torturous” death because of his weight.

Jones, who had argued his health conditions could lead to a painful gave a lengthy last statement. His final words were: “I’m sorry.”

Jones was sent to death row for the 1995 rape and killing of Mary Phillips. He strangled her with the cord to a coffee pot. He was also convicted of trying to kill Phillips’ daughter, aged 11, and was convicted of another rape and killing in Florida.

Williams declined to make a final statement. He was sent to death row for the 1994 rape and killing of Stacy Errickson, 22, whom he kidnapped.

Another inmate was executed last week and a final one is scheduled for tomorrow. TURKISH warplanes carried out air strikes against suspected Kurdish rebel positions on the Sinjar Mountai in northern Iraq and north-eastern Syria, the military said, in a bid to prevent militants from smuggling fighters and weapons into Turkey.

A Syrian Kurdish militia force said the strikes hit a media centre, a local radio station, a communication headquarters and some military posts, killing an undetermined number of fighters in Syria’s north-eastern Hassakeh province.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory For Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian war, also reported the strikes on the media and military targets in Karachok.

It added that an air strike killed three members of the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG.