Arkansas Schedules Unprecedented Eight Executions in Eleven-Day Period

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson signed orders on February 27 for an unprecedented eight executions to be carried out over a period of eleven days in April. The scheduled dates for the four sets of double executions are: April 17, Bruce Ward and Don Davis; April 20, Stacey Johnson and Ledell Lee; April 24, Jack Jones and Marcel Williams; and April 27, Kenneth Williams and Jason McGehee. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge asked that the dates be set after the U.S. Supreme Court on February 21 declined to review a state court decision upholding Arkansas’ lethal injection protocol. Because of drug shortages and challenges to its lethal injection procedures, the state has not carried out an execution since 2005. If all eight executions are performed, it will be the first time since 1997 that a state has executed eight people in one month, when Texas conducted eight executions in both May and June of that year. No other state has conducted as many as eight executions in a single month since executions resumed in the U.S. in 1977, and no state has carried out eight executions in ten days. Scheduling two or more executions on the same day is also unusual; states have executed two or three inmates on the same day just ten times in the last forty years, and no state has carried out more than one double execution in the same week. The hurried schedule appears to be an attempt to use the state’s current supply of eight doses of midazolam, which will expire at the end of April. Arkansas does not currently have a supply of potassium chloride, the killing drug specified in its execution protocol, but believes it can obtain supplies of that drug prior to the scheduled execution dates. Attorneys for the eight death-row prisoners filed an amended challenge to Arkansas’ lethal injection procedures in state court on February 25 and wrote a letter to the governor urging him to reconsider the lethal injection protocol. “We believe it would be a mistake for you to uncritically accept the Supreme Court’s opinion as a license to use the current protocol,” the attorneys said. “Not only would our clients suffer, but so would our state’s image and moral standing in the eyes of the country and the world.” No state has successfully executed two prisoners on the same day using midazolam. Oklahoma attempted to do so on April 29, 2014, but called off the second execution after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett earlier that night. The eight prisoners scheduled for execution make up 23% of Arkansas’ current death row.

(A. DeMillo, “Arkansas governor sets execution dates for 8 inmates,” Associated Press, February 27, 2017; “Multiple executions rare in US, Arkansas just scheduled 4,” Associated Press, February 27, 2017; S. Barnes, “Arkansas Sets Eight Executions for April Despite Drug Shortage,” Reuters, February 27, 2017.) For historical data, see DPIC’s Execution Database and our analysis of the Most U.S. Executions in Shortest Time Span.