US rush to state killings

Submitted by Matthew on 26 April, 2017 - 10:13 Author: Stephen Larkin

On Friday 21 April, the US state of Arkansas carried out the first in a series of four executions, all scheduled before the end of the month. Ledell Lee was killed at the age of 51, after more than 20 years on death row; his was the US’s seventh execution this year, and the first to take place in Arkansas since 2005.

The remaining inmates are, at the time of writing, scheduled for execution within a week. It must’ve been a harrowing final few hours for Lee, who was granted a temporary stay of execution minutes before he was supposed to be put to death. It took less than five hours for that last appeal to travel from Arkansas’ lower courts to the US Supreme Court, where the first tie-breaking vote from Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch ensured its rejection. (With the judge’s confirmation earlier this month, five out of nine members of the Supreme Court are conservative, and therefore ambivalent — at best — towards the death penalty).

The court’s decision was communicated at 11.30 pm CT that night; Lee was declared dead at 11.56
p.m. To remark upon the likelihood of a Trump appointee being responsible for a death mere days after taking office is perhaps, by now, to state the obvious (and invite a jaded nod from the reader).

Yet it is far from the only conclusion one should take from this case. The circumstances surrounding Ledell Lee’s execution are the kind of sordid ones we might expect from an episode of Fargo, not from a supposedly impartial judiciary, in a supposedly advanced democracy. Asa Hutchinson, Republican governor of Arkansas, originally planned for the state to hold eight executions by the end of this month but four were successfully stopped by court orders last week. (Lee was the only one whose appeal on the basis of intellectual disability was refused).

If Governor Hutchinson, elected riding the Tea Party wave in 2014, could not afford to lose the support of his hardliners, this sudden rush to murder also had a more farcical explanation. The state’s stock of midazolam — the sedative component of lethal injection — is set to expire on 30 April, and will be difficult to replenish. An absurdity further compounded by the recent revelation that another ingredient in the execution cocktail, vecuronium bromide, was purchased by the state under false pretences (it couldn’t have got it otherwise).

There are other similar details to this grim story — Ledell Lee continually claimed his innocence, was convicted in an unfair trial (not only was his judge having an affair with the prosecutor, but his counsel was reportedly drunk at the time of the hearing), and was refused DNA tests. All this only serves to illustrate the moral bankruptcy of a state where the judicial system is inherently political, and human beings can be sacrificed for short-term electoral approval.

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