Judge rules executions by injection no violation
Posted on Thursday, August 7, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/233546/
A federal judge on Wednesday upheld the constitutionality of Arkansas’ lethal injection procedures, removing a legal barrier to the execution of four inmates who had challenged the procedures.
Frank Williams Jr., Terrick Nooner, Don Davis and Jack Harold Jones are among death-row inmates around the country who have filed lawsuits contending that the combination of drugs used in lethal injections poses a risk that the person being executed could suffer pain, a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
In April the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the procedures used in Kentucky. The court said the risk of a botched execution wasn’t great enough to violate the Eighth Amendment.
In dismissing the Arkansas inmates’ lawsuit Wednesday, U. S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that Arkansas’ procedures, including changes made in response to the lawsuit and the Supreme Court ruling, are “substantially similar” to those used in Kentucky.
“Plaintiffs have failed to come forward with evidence that Arkansas’ protocol for execution by lethal injection subjects them to a constitutionally significant risk of pain,” Wright wrote.
Attorneys for the inmates and the state attorney general’s office said the ruling was expected and that the inmates will likely appeal.
Dina Tyler, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Correction, said the ruling confirmed what “we have maintained all along.”
“I think that the court recognizes that the state of Arkansas has done everything possible to ensure that executions are the most painless they can be,” Tyler said.
The lawsuit focuses on the three-drug “cocktail” used in Arkansas and most other states. The first drug, sodium pentothal, causes unconsciousness; the second, pancuronium bromide causes paralysis; and the third, potassium chloride, stops the heart.
The inmates contend that, if the first drug is administered incorrectly, the inmate could be awake while the second and third drugs are administered and would suffer pain but could not cry out.
After the suit was filed in 2006, Arkansas amended its procedures to require the deputy director or his designee to make sure the inmate is unconscious after the first drug is administered.
The executioners must also wait three minutes before administering the second and third drugs.
Wright noted that the plaintiff’s expert, an anesthesiologist, said that the 3 grams of sodium pentothal would be more than enough to cause unconsciousness.
The state’s procedures are substantially similar to those used in Missouri, which were upheld by the 8 th Circuit Court of Appeals last year, Wright noted. In that ruling, the court found the risk of inadequate anesthetization to be “far too remote to be constitutionally significant.”
The Arkansas inmates also say executioners could resort to painful procedures to gain access to a vein.
During the 1992 execution of Rickey Ray Rector, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, executioners made nine needle marks on his arms and hands and a 2-inchwide incision on the inside of his right arm while trying to find a vein. A catheter was eventually inserted in a vein on top of his right hand.
But Arkansas’ revised procedures eliminated mention of the “cut-down” procedure that the plaintiffs contend was used on Rector, Wright noted.
Correction Department Chief Deputy Director Ray Hobbs also testified that if an incision is necessary to gain access to a vein, it will be made by a physician and will not go through muscle tissue.
Wright also noted that none of the inmates in the lawsuit claimed to have physical conditions that would make it hard to gain access to a vein.
Wright’s order lifted a stay of execution that she had granted Davis, so no pending challenges to his execution remain He was convicted of slaying a 62-year-old Rogers woman in 1990.
A stay granted by the 8 th Circuit Court of Appeals remains in place for Jones, convicted in the murder of a 35-year-old woman in Bald Knob in 1995.
Nooner also has a stay, granted by U. S. District Judge Leon Holmes, in a separate case that contends Nooner should be exonerated on the basis of an analysis of a surveillance tape from the Little Rock coin operated laundry where he was convicted of killing a 22-year-old University of Arkansas at Little Rock student in 1993.
Williams, scheduled for execution Sept. 9 for the shooting death of a Lafayette County farmer in 1992, has no stay in place, but he has a pending lawsuit in Pulaski County Circuit Court arguing that the state’s lethal injection procedures were amended without proper public notice.