Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Friday scheduled one condemned killer to die and hours later announced that he planned to spare the life of a different death-row inmate.
In his first action of the morning, Hutchinson signed a death warrant for Jack Gordon Greene, the convicted killer of a Johnson County minister, and set the date of execution for Nov. 9.
Then, shortly before noon, Hutchinson's office announced the governor's intent to grant clemency to Jason McGehee, whose plea for life was viewed favorably by the Parole Board in the spring. McGehee will serve life in prison without a chance for parole.
McGehee, 41, was one of eight men Hutchinson scheduled for lethal injection in April at the Cummins prison. Four of those sentences were carried out, and now the state plans to conduct a fifth execution before year's end. Greene was not one of those originally scheduled to die in April.
Hutchinson took months to review the Parole Board's recommendation in McGehee's case, and it would be the first time he extended mercy to death row, which houses 30 condemned men.
At age 20, McGehee led a group of younger men in beating and strangling 15-year-old John Melbourne Jr. in 1996, though it was not McGehee who was accused of delivering the fatal blow.
The judge who presided over McGehee's trial came out in favor of clemency, as did a former director of the Department of Correction.
The Boone County sheriff and prosecutor did not. Melbourne's father, John Melbourne Sr., tearfully opposed clemency before the Parole Board.
During an April meeting with reporters, Hutchinson described carrying out the death penalty as "the heaviest and most serious responsibility" of his office.
"In making this decision I considered many factors including the entire trial transcript, meetings with members of the victim's family and the recommendation of the Parole Board," Hutchinson said in a statement Friday.
Hutchinson added that he considered the "disparity" in McGehee's punishment in his decision to relax it. None of the other participants in the attack on Melbourne were sentenced to death.
Like McGehee, Greene is likely to appeal for clemency, one of his attorneys, John Williams, said Friday after traveling to visit his client on death row at the Varner SuperMax prison.
His attorneys contend that Greene has been made delusional by severe mental illness, and thus is unfit to be executed.
Greene, 62, is the oldest prisoner on Arkansas' death row. A Johnson County jury sentenced him to die in 1992 to for killing retired minister Sidney Burnett in Knoxville in 1991.
Greene's death sentence was later overturned on appeal, but another jury chose to give him the highest punishment.
The crime was described as a "bloody mess" by the former county sheriff, Eddy King, in the courtroom.
Greene had traveled from North Carolina, where his brother, Tommy, also had been killed -- Greene's murder conviction in that state was later overturned -- before beating Burnett with a can of hominy and shooting him in the head. Police tracked down Greene in Norman, Okla.
Edna Burnett, Sidney Burnett's wife, said by phone Friday that she did not plan to attend the execution. She said she did not wish to discuss the case further.
"That was a long time ago," Burnett said.
The Department of Correction announced last week that it had obtained a new supply of midazolam, the sedative used in state executions.
The state's previous supply of the drug expired at the end of April, prompting the bid for eight of executions that month.
As a part of vigorous court challenges that sought to halt the April executions, attorneys for the condemned inmates argued they were being rushed through an abbreviated clemency process that had been cut to fewer than 50 days.
Greene has more than 75 days until his scheduled execution, which would be on a Thursday. Previous executions this year began at 7 p.m.
Arkansas had gone more than a decade without any executions before reviving lethal injections earlier this year. Before April, the last execution was in November 2005.
Before Hutchinson's announcement Friday, the last Arkansas governor to commute a death sentence was Mike Huckabee in 1999. It was the only such example of clemency since use of the death penalty resumed.
Hutchinson will have to wait out a 30-day review period before making his decision final.
EXECUTIONS: In-depth look at 4 men put to death in April + 3 others whose executions were stayed
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A Section on 08/26/2017