Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel recent­ly said the state’s death penal­ty sys­tem was ​“com­plete­ly bro­ken” and rec­om­mend­ed it be abol­ished if the state’s exe­cu­tion method isn’t changed. McDaniel said, ​“It’s time for the pol­i­cy mak­ers of Arkansas to say, ​‘Do we con­tin­ue with a bro­ken sys­tem and throw­ing mon­ey and resources at essen­tial­ly point­less lit­i­ga­tion, or do we mod­i­fy the sys­tem?’ And there’s only real­ly two mod­i­fi­ca­tions that I see avail­able — it’s either abol­ish the death penal­ty or change the method of exe­cu­tion.” He added, ​“Frankly, I don’t think we are telling jurors the truth when we lead them to believe that they are sen­tenc­ing some­one to death when we real­ly don’t have a viable sys­tem with which to exe­cute some­one.” In speak­ing to the Sheriffs Associaton, he crit­i­cized the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col because there are no exe­cu­tion drugs avail­able and because of the dif­fi­cul­ty in get­ting physi­cians to par­tic­i­pate in exe­cu­tions. Arkansas cur­rent­ly has 38 inmates on death row. The state’s last exe­cu­tion was in 2005. 

(S. Ryburn, ​“McDaniel: State’s Death-Penalty System ​‘Completely Broken’,” Arkansas News Bureau, July 10, 2013; pho­to from Wikimedia Commons by cen­tu­ry coun­cil). See Lethal Injection and New Voices.

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