Rush to kill

Arkansas’ jam shows the absurdity of the death penalty.

Houstonians are likely aware that the wonders of “The Natural State” — Arkansas, that is — are less than half a day’s drive away. Visitors can dig for diamonds at Murfreesboro, tour the Clinton Presidential Library built over the Arkansas River in Little Rock, or head up to Fort Smith and gape at a replica of the gallows where at least 79 19thcentury felons met their bitter end at the behest of Judge Isaac Charles Parker, the notorious “hanging judge.” Both “True Grit” movies, based on the classic novel by Charles Portis, depict a Parker-ordered triple hanging at Fort Smith.

Now, if you’re an Arkansan, you don’t have to rely on history or the movies to indulge any curiosity about statesanctioned killing. The director of the state’s Department of Corrections is looking for folks to come watch her kill people. Last week, she delivered a special invitation to members of the Little Rock Rotary Club.

“You seem to be a group that does not have felony backgrounds and are over 21,” Wendy Kelley told the Rotarians, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “So if you’re interested in serving in that area, in this serious role, just call my office.”

Kelley finds herself in this fix, because her state plans to execute eight inmates within a span of 10 days next month, and by law she needs six to 12 “respectable citizens” as witnesses. She and Gov. Asa Hutchinson are in a rush to kill the unlucky eight because the state’s supply of one of the three lethalinjection ingredients, the sedative midazolam, will soon expire. Arkansas is likely to find it difficult to acquire more, because drug makers have stopped selling the sedative to U.S. prisons. The drug makers are squeamish about their products being used in executions.

Prison staff will be conducting two executions daily until the eight men are all dispatched. A crash course in killing procedure is necessary since Arkansas, unlike Texas, has little experience with state-sanctioned killing — in recent years, that is. The state hasn’t executed an inmate since 2005.

We suspect that even John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn — and certainly 14-year-old Mattie Ross, the “True Grit” narrator — would find something goulish about the state’s preternatural haste. The injection spree, its schedule accelerated solely by an expiring drug choice, is yet another reminder of the cruel absurdity of capital punishment, as more and more Americans are coming to realize. Six states have abolished the death penalty in the past seven years, most recently Delaware in 2016.

Twenty states in all have done away with capital punishment. There will come a time when Arkansas’ lethal drugsand-needle regimen will be a historical oddity on the order of Judge Parker’s gallows. The big state just to Arkansas’ southwest is headed in that direction too.