The Tennessee Supreme Court has denied a request from the state’s attor­ney gen­er­al to sched­ule eight exe­cu­tions before the June 1, 2018 expi­ra­tion date of Tennessee’s sup­ply of one of its exe­cu­tion drugs. Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery had filed the request on February 14, say­ing that sched­ul­ing exe­cu­tions ​“after June 1, 2018 is uncer­tain due to the ongo­ing dif­fi­cul­ty in obtain­ing the nec­es­sary lethal injec­tion chem­i­cals.” The court’s March 15, 2018 order did not explain why it reject­ed the request, but it did set two exe­cu­tion dates to be car­ried out lat­er in the year. The court sched­uled the exe­cu­tion of Edmund Zagorski for October 11 and set a December 6 exe­cu­tion date for David Earl Miller. Three oth­er Tennessee death-row pris­on­ers already had exe­cu­tion dates this year, though two of them—James Hawkins and Sedrick Clayton—have not yet com­plet­ed their appeals. Thirty-three Tennessee death-row pris­on­ers are chal­leng­ing the state’s use of mida­zo­lam as part of its exe­cu­tion pro­to­col, argu­ing that the pro­to­col ​“amounts to tor­tur­ing pris­on­ers to death.” The pris­on­ers cite botched exe­cu­tions in oth­er states that have used mida­zo­lam, includ­ing Dennis McGuire in Ohio, Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, Joseph Wood in Arizona, and Ronald Smith in Alabama. Because of that lit­i­ga­tion and the Attorney General’s state­ments about the unavail­abil­i­ty of lethal-injec­tion drugs, Tennessee’s abil­i­ty to car­ry out any of the sched­uled exe­cu­tions remains uncer­tain. The state pros­e­cu­tor’s request was rem­i­nis­cent of Arkansas’s con­tro­ver­sial attempt in April 2017 to car­ry out eight exe­cu­tions over the span of eleven days before its sup­ply of mida­zo­lam expired. Four of those exe­cu­tions were stayed and wit­ness­es report­ed indi­ca­tions that two of the exe­cut­ed pris­on­ers—Jack Jones and Kenneth WIlliams—remained con­scious dur­ing the exe­cu­tion process after the mida­zo­lam was sup­posed to have ren­dered them insensate. 

(Dave Boucher, Tennessee Supreme Court denies AG’s request for 8 exe­cu­tions by June 1, USA Today, March 15, 2018; Steven Hale, Tennessee Supreme Court Denies State’s Request for Rush of Executions, Nashville Scene, March 15, 2018.) See Lethal Injection and Upcoming Executions.

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