The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty law on Friday, faulting a provision that permitted the Corrections Department to select the fatal drugs used in an execution.
The court ruled 5 to 2 that the Legislature must set the quantity and type of drugs in a lethal injection. The 2009 law left those decisions to the director of the Corrections Department. The court sided with 10 death row inmates who challenged the law’s constitutionality.
Prison officials across the nation are grappling with a shortage of an anesthetic called sodium thiopental that is one of three drugs used in a lethal injection. The only American company that manufactured the drug stopped producing it in 2010, saying the active ingredient had become difficult to obtain.
Arkansas does not have any doses of the drug left, and its law does not specify whether a substitute is allowed.
The 37 inmates on the state’s death row will not be executed until the
Legislature responds to the ruling, said Dina Tyler, a spokeswoman for
the Corrections Department. But, she said, “we still have a
responsibility to execute these inmates.”
Source: The New York Times, June 22, 2012
