The Guardian: Arkansas carries out first double execution in the US for 16 years

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The first double execution to take place in the US in 16 years was carried out by Arkansas on Monday night amid a fierce dispute over whether the prisoners were subjected to a botched procedure amounting to cruel and unusual punishment.
In dramatic events that erupted a little over an hour after the first prisoner, Jack Jones, was put to death, a federal judge stepped in and temporarily stayed the lethal injection of the second, Marcel Williams, on grounds that Jones’ execution might have been unconstitutional. In frantic legal wrestling, the state conceded that it had spent some time trying to insert an IV line into Jones’ neck, but had failed in the endeavour.
The deputy solicitor general, Nicholas Bronni, admitted in a court filing that the execution team had tried “to place a central line in Jones’ neck, but the attempt was unsuccessful”.
Lawyers representing Williams instantly protested to the courts that it had taken 45 minutes for the execution team to find a vein into which they could inject the lethal cocktail into Jones. The attorneys warned that their client was obese, weighing 400 pounds, and that would render finding his veins even more difficult than his fellow death row inmate.
Three media witnesses were allowed in to see both executions. But the value of their testimony was limited in one crucial regard: they were only permitted to enter the death chamber after the IV lines had been placed into the each prisoner’s veins, which means that there is no independent verification of whether or not the early stages of the death protocol were botched.
The double execution in Arkansas, carried out about three hours apart, marks something of a departure for the death penalty in both the state and the US. Until this month, Arkansas had not executed anyone for 12 years and nationally capital punishment has been markedly declining, with only 20 executions last year, the lowest number since 1991.
The Republican governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, decided to buck this downward trend by announcing that he would schedule eight killings in 11 days, in order to use up a batch of the sedative medazolam that was expiring at the end of this month. Had all the executions taken place, it would have been the largest mass execution in the US for more than 50 years.
In the end, though, the state found itself up against formidable legal challenges brought by lawyers for the inmates and four of the eight were spared immediate death as a result of stays imposed by the courts. -Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/24/arkansas-double-executions-supreme-court-jack-jones-marcel-williams
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