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State to lift voluntary moratorium, proceed with executions Friday, May 2, 2008 By Rob Moritz Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - Arkansas will resume executions by lethal injection now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against a challenge to that method of carrying out the death penalty, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said Thursday. "I would anticipate relatively soon being able to send the governor a letter indicating that it's time for him to set execution dates," McDaniel said, adding Gov. Mike Beebe could begin receiving death warrants within a month. The governor, after receiving the death warrant, sets execution dates for inmates sentenced to death. McDaniel said his office is working on what he described as "minor changes" to the protocol involved in Arkansas executions. The changes are being added, he said, so that the state's execution process "will meet or exceed the standards approved by the (U.S. Supreme) Court." The attorney general made his comments after meeting with Beebe to discuss the state's execution procedure in light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. "On something as serious as taking an Arkansan's life ... it was important that we insure that we've dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's, and the easiest way to do that is to sit down for a few minutes and that's what we did," McDaniel said. Members of the governor's staff met recently with representatives of the Arkansas Death Penalty Moratorium Campaign Committee, an organization working to collect more than 100,000 signatures on a petition asking Beebe to impose a moratorium on executions in the state and to create a commission to study the issue. Beebe said Thursday he was aware of the organization's concerns but felt the state constitution requires him as governor to carry out executions. "Nobody does this lightly, but it is the law," Beebe told the Associated Press. Arkansas has 40 death-row inmates, state prison spokeswoman Dina Tyler said Thursday. In October, McDaniel announced a voluntary moratorium on appealing federal court-ordered stays of executions of several death-row inmates until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Kentucky case challenging lethal injection. In a 7-2 decision last month, the nation's highest court ruled that two Kentucky death row inmates who filed a lawsuit challenging the state's lethal injection procedure failed to show that the procedure constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injection is the most common method of execution in the United States. McDaniel said Thursday he felt all along Arkansas' execution policy was constitutional, but because of the stays issued by federal judges he needed to wait for the Supreme Court to rule. McDaniel's announcement Oct. 31 came just a day after the U.S. Supreme Court stayed a Mississippi execution and U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright in Little Rock cited the case in granting condemned killer Don William Davis' request for a stay of his execution. Davis was scheduled to die Nov. 8 for the murder of Jane Daniels of Rogers in 1990. Terrick Nooner and Jack Harold Jones also had executions set for last fall but they also were stayed pending a Supreme Court ruling. The three men and death-row inmate Frank Williams Jr., were all challenging the state's lethal injection process in a lawsuit similar to the Kentucky case. Justin Allen, Arkansas' chief deputy attorney general, said recently Jones and Davis are likely to be the first of the death-row inmates to have execution dates set. Nooner, sentenced in the 1993 murder of 22-year-old college student Scot Stobaugh at a coin-operated laundry in Little Rock, has a June hearing scheduled on other issues in his appeal, according to Allen. Jones was sentenced in the 1991 rape and strangulation of Bald Knob bookkeeper Mary Phillips and an attack on her 11-year-old daughter. Davis was sentenced in the 1990 murder of Jane Daniel of Rogers and Williams was sentenced in the 1992 slaying of Clyde Spence of Bradley while Williams was on a work-release program for the state Department of Correction. Tyler said Thursday that changes to the execution protocol would include putting in writing that at least two years of medical experience are required for the personnel who insert the intravenous lines and administer the drugs to the condemned inmate. Also, requiring that the drugs be "mixed according to manufacturer's directions" will be put in writing, she said. Tyler said the team that conducts executions already follows both procedures, but neither was actually written as policy. Twenty-seven death-row inmates have been executed in Arkansas since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty constitutional in 1976. The last inmate to be executed in Arkansas was Eric Nance, who was put to death on Nov. 29, 2005. |
