A Louisiana federal court judge has ordered that executions in the state be stayed for at least another year. On July 16, 2018, in proceedings brought by Louisiana death-row prisoners challenging the state's lethal-injection protocol, U.S. District Court Judge Shelly Dick granted a request by state officials to extend by one year the temporary stay of execution that has been in effect in Louisiana since 2014. Jeffrey Cody, the state's lawyer in the case, told the court that continuing the lethal-injection litigation now would be "a waste of resources and time." He asked for the one-year extension "because the facts and issues involved in this proceeding continue to be in a fluid state." The request for an extension has triggered a partisan dispute among Louisiana state elected officials. Jeff Landry, the state's Republican Attorney General, blamed Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards for Louisiana's inability to execute prisoners and for facilitating a court ruling further delaying executions. In a July 18 letter to the Governor that Landry simultaneously distributed to the media, the attorney general said he was withdrawing his office from participating in the lethal-injection lawsuit and would no longer represent the Department of Corrections in that case. Landry claimed that Edwards was "unwilling[ ] to proceed with any executions" and called that "the biggest obstacle" to resuming executions in the state. Edwards called the attorney general's actions "political grandstanding," saying "[h]e issued this release today without trying to contact me at all." He said, "[i]n the one year since the state last requested a stay, which the Attorney General signed on and supported at the time, nothing has changed – the drugs are not available and legislation has not passed to address concerns of drug companies or offer alternative forms of execution." Louisiana currently authorizes the use of a one-drug protocol of the anesthetic pentobarbital, with a backup two-drug method consisting of the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone. According to Department of Corrections spokesperson Ken Pastorick, the state does not have a supply of any of those drugs. The latest stay marked the fourth time since 2015 that the state has requested a delay of the lethal injection litigation. By the time Judge Dick's order expires on July 18, 2019, it will have been nearly ten years since the last execution in Louisiana, which was carried out on January 7, 2010. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, was governor from 2010 until January 2016, after the first federal stay of execution was in effect. 

A new poll of likely voters in Washington State shows that Washingtonians are nearly 3 times more likely to prefer some form of a life sentence to the death penalty as punishment for defendants convicted of murder. The poll, commissioned by the Northwest Progressive Institute (NPI), was conducted by Public Policy Polling and released on July 12, 2018. It found that 69% of likely voters in the state preferred some version of a life sentence as punishment for people convicted of murder, as compared to 24% who said they preferred the death penalty. In a statement describing the poll results, NPI said "not a single subsample within the survey favored the death penalty… not even Donald Trump voters. ... What this tells us is that there is broad agreement across the ideological spectrum for getting rid of the practice of putting convicted murders to death." The poll asked respondents: "Of the following list of choices, which punishment do you prefer for people convicted of murder: life in prison with NO possibility of parole, life in prison with NO possibility of parole and a requirement to work in prison and pay restitution to the victims, life in prison with a possibility of parole after at least forty years, or the death penalty?" The most preferred option was life in prison without parole, plus restitution, which 46% of all respondents supported. An additional 10% preferred life without possibility of parole, while 13% favored life in prison with parole eligibility after at least forty years. 8% said they were not sure. Every political demographic preferred some version of a life sentence over the death penalty: 82% of respondents who identified themselves as Democrats favored one of the life options, as did 63% of Independents or supporters of a minor party, and 54% of Republicans. 48% of respondents who said they voted for Donald Trump preferred one of the life-sentencing alternatives, as compared with 46% who preferred the death penalty. In 2014, Gov. Jay Inslee imposed a moratorium on executions, saying that "[t]he use of the death penalty in [Washington] state is unequally applied." A bipartisan bill to abolish the death penalty passed the state senate and was approved in the House Judiciary Committee in 2017, but House Speaker Frank Chopp, a Democrat, did not bring the bill to a vote in the full House before the legislature adjourned. "Five Republicans stood with us in the Senate," said Reuven Carlyle, a Democratic senator from Seattle, "but the House leadership was still unwilling to bring it to the floor." Washington's Democratic Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who along with his Republican predecessor Rob McKenna have urged legislators to repeal the state's capital-punishment statute, said he was "not shocked by the numbers." He said the public mood about the death penalty has "been changing quickly" and "we need additional legislators to help out. ... This poll will further signal to them that not only is this the right thing to do, to abolish the death penalty law in Washington state, but is precisely what the people of Washington state want and expect their legislature to do." (Click graphic to enlarge.) Washington juries have not imposed any new death sentences in more than five years and the state last carried out an execution in 2010.

Alabama will not execute eight death-row prisoners by means of the problematic lethal-injection protocol they have been challenging, but will instead carry out the executions using lethal gas. In a Joint Motion to Dismiss the prisoners' federal litigation over the state's execution protocol, filed on July 10, 2018, the parties agreed that the lawsuit had been rendered moot by the state's passage of legislation authorizing execution by nitrogen gas and the prisoners' election to die by nitrogen hypoxia. Alabama's lethal-injection process uses the controversial sedative midazolam, which has been implicated in numerous executions across the country that have been described as "botched." In October 2017, witnesses to Alabama's 35-minute execution of Torrey McNabb reportedly "expressed repeated concerns to each other that he was still conscious during the lethal injection." Alabama federal defender Christine Freeman, the director of the Alabama Post-Conviction Relief Project, testified on July 10 in separate litigation over Tennessee's lethal-injection process that she had witnessed McNabb grimacing and raising his arm up twenty minutes into the execution, well after the midazolam was supposed to have rendered him unconscious. Witnesses also reported that Alabama prisoner Ronald Smith heaved, coughed, clenched his left fist, and opened one eye during one 13-minute period of his 34-minute execution in December 2016. After Alabama added nitrogen gas as an option for carrying out the death penalty, the prisoners had a June 30 deadline to select gas as the method of their execution. In a nitrogen hypoxia execution, the prisoner breathes pure nitrogen, which displaces oxygen in the bloodstream, suffocating them. Experts characterized the prisoners' choice as preferring the unknown risks of execution by nitrogen gas to the known risks of execution by lethal injection. Nitrogen gas has never been used as a method of execution in the United States, but has been approved as an option by three states—Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. Of the three states, only Alabama leaves the choice of execution method to the prisoner. Mississippi and Oklahoma allow nitrogen executions only if lethal injection is held unconstitutional or is "otherwise unavailable," although Oklahoma has indicated that it is developing a lethal gas protocol to replace lethal injection. According to the federal defender's office representing the Alabama prisoners, their clients in the case, "and anyone else who elected the new method, cannot now be executed by lethal injection." Alabama still must develop a nitrogen-hypoxia protocol before it can carry out any executions using that method, and the prisoners have not waived their right to challenge that protocol. Federal public defender John Palombi, who represents the prisoners, said "While the best way to reduce the risks of botched executions would be to abolish the death penalty, if the death penalty does exist, it must be carried out in a constitutional manner with the respect and dignity that is required of such a solemn event." Alabama's lethal-injection protocol is the most secretive in the nation. Palombi encouraged the state to make the nitrogen hypoxia protocol public "so that the people of the state of Alabama know what is being done in their name."

A new study of Tennessee's death penalty concludes that the state's capital-punishment system is "a cruel lottery" that is "riddled with arbitrariness." The study, published in the summer 2018 issue of the Tennessee Journal of Law and Policy, examined every first-degree murder case in Tennessee since 1977 to determine whether the state had redressed the arbitrariness that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the nation's death-penalty laws unconstitutional in 1972. In their article, Tennessee's Death Penalty Lottery, lawyers H.E. Miller, Jr., who conducted the study, and Bradley A. MacLean write that the odds "are close to nil" that a person who was supplied with a description of the 2,514 first-degree murder cases prosecuted in Tennessee in the last forty years could identify the 86 cases that have resulted in death sentences sustained on appeal or the six cases that have resulted in executions. The facts of the crime, they found, did not predict whether a death sentence would be imposed. Rather, the best indicators were arbitrary factors such as where the murder occurred, the race of the defendant, the quality of the defense, and the views of the prosecutors and judges assigned to the case. The study found that more Tennessee death sentences have been overturned in the courts — 106 — than have been sustained, and many of the sustained cases are still under post-conviction appeal. Moreover, the study found "a sharp decline" in death sentences imposed over the past twenty years. In the four-year period from July 1989 through June 1993, there were 282 first-degree murder cases in Tennessee, with 38 trials resulting in death sentences; from July 2009 through June 2013, 284 first-degree murder cases produced six death sentences. Tennessee has imposed only one new death sentence since 2013. The authors concluded that "[t]he death penalty system as it has operated in Tennessee over the past 40 years, and especially over the past ten years, is but a cruel lottery, entrenching the very problems that [the Supreme Court] sought to eradicate." The study was released shortly before Tennessee is scheduled to perform its first execution in nearly nine years. The state plans to execute Billy Ray Irick on August 9, 2018, using a three-drug protocol (midazolam, vecuronium bromide, and potassium chloride) that has been implicated in past botched executions in other states. More than 30 death-row prisoners are suing the state, arguing that the protocol violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Even Tennessee's own corrections staff has raised concerns about the plan. An unidentified state employee who was working to obtain lethal injection drugs wrote in an email to state officials: "Here is my concern with Midazolam. Being a benzodiazepine, it does not elicit strong analgesic effects. The subjects may be able to feel pain from the administration of the second and third drugs. Potassium chloride, especially." The state's plan to use compounded drugs has also drawn criticism, in part because drug-production by compounding pharmacies is not subject to the same regulatory oversight as drugs produced by major manufacturers. In a trial that began July 9, lawyers for the prisoners argued that medical evidence will show that Tennessee's three-drug combination is the equivalent of chemical waterboarding, being buried alive, or being exposed to liquid fire or sarin gas. Prosecutors have argued that to be unconstitutional, the state's execution method would have to amount to torture or be a gruesome practice such as disembowelment, beheading, or burning at the stake.