Ark. executes 2 inmates hours apart

VARNER, Ark. — Two inmates received lethal injections on the same gurney Monday night about three hours apart as Arkansas completed the nation’s first double execution since 2000, just days after the state ended a nearly 12-year hiatus on administering capital punishment.

While the first inmate, Jack Jones, was executed on schedule, shortly after 7 p.m., attorneys for the second, Marcel Williams, convinced a federal judge minutes later to briefly delay his punishment over concerns about how the earlier one was carried out. They claimed Jones gasped 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 10:33 p.m.

Initially, Gov. Asa Hutchinson scheduled four double executions over an 11-day period in April. The eight executions would have been the most by a state in such a compressed period since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The state said the executions needed to be carried out before its supply of one lethal injection drug expires April 30.

The first three executions were canceled because of court decisions, then inmate Ledell Lee was executed last week — Arkansas’ first execution last week after a nearly 12-year hiatus.

The last state to put more than one inmate to death on the same day was Texas, which executed two killers in August 2000.

Jones was sent to death row for the 1995 rape and killing of Mary Phillips. He was also convicted of attempting to kill Phillips’ 11year-old daughter and was convicted in another rape and killing in Florida.

Williams was sent to death row for the 1994 rape and killing of 22-year-old Stacy Errickson, whom he kidnapped from a gas station in central Arkansas.

Authorities said Williams abducted and raped two other women in the days before he was arrested in Errickson’s death. Williams admitted responsibility to the state Parole Board last month.

Including Jones and Williams, nine people have been executed in the United States this year — four in Texas, three in Arkansas and one each in Missouri and Virginia.

Elsewhere, on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Williams’ final appeals, its justices were grappling with whether defendants who may be mentally ill are entitled to independent expert witnesses, and whether defendants could get an additional option for recourse if they think improper jury instructions could change the verdicts in their cases.