Arkansas officials, reconsider your reckless rush to execute
The beat-the-clock spectacle unfolding in Arkansas, triggered by the state’s unprecedented scheme to carry out wholesale executions before the shelf life of a lethal injection drug expires, demonstrates more than ever how the death penalty in America is becoming less and less workable.
Multiple legal challenges have already blocked three of eight executions the state wanted to carry out by the end of the month. As of Tuesday afternoon, five lethal injections remained on track, including double executions scheduled for Thursday and next Monday.
No state in modern history has ever tried to put so many people to death in so short a time. In fact, there were only 20 executions in all of America last year, down from 98 in 1999. The procedure continues primarily in a narrow belt of Southern states, so it’s little surprise that the Arkansas process has descended into confusion and controversy.
Growing societal displeasure with capital punishment has led drugmakers to try to prevent their products from being used in executions. This has caused shortages of lethal chemicals, the use of untested combinations and, in Arkansas, a rush to execute as many death row inmates as possible before running out of the drugs on hand.
Capital punishment still finds favor with most Americans, and there can be compelling arguments for the death penalty, particularly in cases involving heinous crimes and incontrovertible guilt. The convicted killers on Arkansas’ death row deserve no sympathy; they deserve life in prison without the possibility of parole, a fate that some consider worse than death.
But the tide of history is turning against the death penalty. Capital punishment has proved to be neither a deterrent nor fairly imposed. Moreover, the process can be enormously costly to taxpayers, can lead to innocent people being placed on death row, and puts the United States out of step with other democracies.
Arkansas hasn’t put anyone to death since 2005, and after a long debate over procedure and a narrowing window of viable drugs, opted to plunge ahead with its reckless schedule.
There’s no firm consensus that the execution method used by Arkansas and other states actually works without causing restrained prisoners extreme pain and suffering. The process involves utilizing a sedative called midazolam to render the condemned unconscious, while a second drug paralyzes and a third stops the heart. In a 2015 dissent, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the process the “chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.”
The last attempt at two executions in one day was in Oklahoma in 2014. The first inmate took 43 minutes to die, writhing and moaning and lifting his head. The second execution was called off, and an investigation later found that the lethal injection team was too stressed by the imposed pace to do an adequate job.
With two nights of double executions slated for the next two weeks, Arkansas is risking the same outcome, which would surely not advance the cause of death penalty advocates. Judges are right to put the brakes on such helter-skelter haste.