Arkansas, Nevada Obtain New Supplies of Drugs, Plan to Carry Out Two Questionable Executions

The states of Arkansas and Nevada have announced that they have obtained new supplies of execution drugs that will permit them to carry out two executions in what critics have called questionable circumstances.

On August 4, Arkansas obtained a supply of midazolam—the controversial drug used in botched executions in at least four states—paying $250 in cash to an undisclosed supplier for 40 vials of the drug. Then, on August 17, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge asked Governor Asa Hutchinson to set an execution date for Jack Greene (pictured), described by his lawyers as “a severely mentally ill man [with] well-documented brain damage.” Also on August 17, Nevada—which does not currently have an execution protocol in place—announced that it had obtained drugs to execute Scott Dozier, using a three-drug formula that no state has ever tried before. Dozier—who has waived his appeal rights and volunteered to be executed—is scheduled to die on November 14.

In a press statement, Greene’s lawyer, John C. Williams, said “[c]apital punishment should not be used on vulnerable people like the severely mentally ill.” Greene, he said, is mentally incompetent and suffers from delusions that “his spinal cord has been removed and his central nervous system has been destroyed.” Responding to this delusion, Williams said, Greene “constantly twist[s] his body and stuff[s] his ear and nose with toilet paper to cope with the pain,” often causing himself to bleed.

A spokesperson for Hutchinson—who authorized Arkansas’s unprecedented attempt to execute eight prisoners over an eleven-day span in April—has indicated that the governor will set an execution date for Greene.

To execute Dozier, Nevada has indicated that it will use an untried combination of diazepam (Valium), fentanyl (an opiod), and cisatracurium (a paralytic). The state has not yet announced how the drugs will be administered. All but one of the prisoners executed in Nevada since 1977 were found to have waived their appeals; Dozier would be the state’s 12th death-row prisoner to volunteer to be executed. Nevada recently spent nearly $900,000 on building a new execution chamber.