So how is Arkansas faring reputation-wise on its killing spree?
There’s Ross Douthat, the nearest thing The New York Times can do for a conservative op-ed columnist. His Sunday column contains this Arkansas-based phrase near the top: “Reasonable people can disagree on the death penalty, but everyone should recognize the dark absurdity of an execution timetable set by a drug’s expiration date.”
That sounds a little critical, doesn’t it?
The essence of Douthat’s essay is that the lethal-injection system of execution, once considered the humane alternative to electrocution, ought to be deep-sixed and replaced by firing squads. He seems in the column to intend a mixture of provocation and seriousness.
The thinking is that guns and bullets are easier to get than killing chemicals, and, if you know what you’re doing, more efficient in getting the killing job done without botching.
Reputation aside, Arkansas may have emerged in the vanguard of a seismic American shift. I refer to the probable looming evolution among states that choose to have capital punishment — if evolution is the right word. I refer to a transition from lethal injections to firing squads.
If Arkansas executed by firing squads, there would be no need, you see, to schedule eight killings by the end of April because of an expiration date. Anybody trying to put an expiration date on a gun in America would have the National Rifle Association to reckon with.
Shooting death row inmates at reasonably scheduled intervals over a period of months would be much more decorous than what Arkansas is seeking to do with IV insertions in a heated rush at the end of April, you see.
Here is the issue in full context: It appears that Arkansas is making such an unseemly spectacle of lethal injections that the nation is looking anew at the supposedly reformative notion of having an array of people line up and shoot a guy.
Here’s a prediction for Arkansas: The Legislature will pass a firing-squad method but only after amending out the namby-pamby notion that one of the shooters would fire blanks.
Moving on: There is a British-based international weekly magazine with an American edition called The Week. It’s a highly serviceable compilation of a week’s news of the world as well as published commentaries from left and right and in between.
This week it carries an opinion piece headlined “Why Arkansas’ execution controversy is a really big deal.”
The column, by journalist and filmmaker Anthony L. Fisher, recounts that the Arkansas killing spree is all about a rush to beat an expiration on drugs that are generally becoming less available because of declining support for the death penalty. And it concludes: “Arkansas’ flurry of death warrants is not a matter of justice. It’s a matter of expedience. And that is an injustice that should worry us all.”
As I have endeavored to explain, the international news lure is not eight scheduled executions. Other states have scheduled and carried out that many killings and more, and stayed out of the international glare. The point is scheduling eight killings in a compressed hurry for no reason other than the availability of a drug.
Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court addressed that issue in a dissent last week from a ruling that let Arkansas kill Ledell Lee at 11:56 p.m. on a death warrant expiring at midnight.
(Whew, five minutes later and it would’ve been murder).
Breyer wrote: “Apparently the reason the state decided to proceed with these eight executions is that the ‘use-by’ date of the state’s execution drug is about to expire. In my view, that factor, when considered as a determining factor separating those who live from those who die, is close to random.”
In other words, it might not be deliberative justice — but a random act — to kill a man in a frenzy when he would otherwise live to die another day if only a drug bottle had a different date on it.
Breyer is implying that killing people at random is not the way for a state to go.
Meanwhile, back on death row in Arkansas: The state on Monday night twice opened that drug bottle ahead of May 1, first to kill a diabetes-suffering amputee and second to kill a 400-pound man.
Let’s call that a random urgency. And let the record reflect that “random urgency” is an oxymoron that none other than Arkansas introduced in April 2017 to the national criminal-justice lexicon.
Alas, our beloved state seems in this matter to be both a policymaking frontier and a state of ill repute.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.