On June 22, the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s lethal injec­tion law as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because it del­e­gat­ed too much author­i­ty to the Department of Corrections. In a 5 – 2 deci­sion, the court sided with 10 death row inmates who argued that, under Arkansas’s con­sti­tu­tion, only the Legislature can set exe­cu­tion pol­i­cy, and that leg­is­la­tors vio­lat­ed the state’s sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers doc­trine when it vot­ed to give that author­i­ty to the prison sys­tem in the Method of Execution Act of 2009. The rul­ing does not inval­i­date Arkansas’s death penal­ty but does leave the state with­out a law­ful way to car­ry out exe­cu­tions until a new law is passed. Associate Justice Jim Gunter, writ­ing for the major­i­ty, said that the law gov­ern­ing exe­cu­tions failed to include rea­son­able guide­lines for exec­u­tive branch agen­cies to fol­low when decid­ing on an exe­cu­tion pro­to­col: ​“The statute pro­vides no guid­ance and no gen­er­al pol­i­cy with regard to the pro­ce­dures for the (Arkansas Department of Corrections) to imple­ment lethal injec­tions.” There are cur­rent­ly 40 pris­on­ers on Arkansas’s death row. The last exe­cu­tion car­ried out in the state was in 2005.

The court found issues raised by the inmates regard­ing the state’s pur­chase of sodi­um thiopen­tal from a com­pa­ny in England to be moot because the state had destroyed those drugs. 

(“Court strikes down Arkansas law on exe­cu­tion meth­ods,” CNN, June 22, 2012; Hobbs v. Jones, et al., No. 11 – 1128, (Ark. June 22, 2012)). See Lethal Injection. Listen to DPIC’s pod­cast on Lethal Injection.

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