An Arkansas inmate on death row who came within a day of being executed in 2017 received welcome news from a federal appeals court which ruled he can sue state officials in his bid to have new tests run on DNA evidence.
Stacey Eugene Johnson, 53, who was condemned to death for the 1993 murder of Carol Heath in De Queen, received a stay of execution from the state Supreme Court in a 4-3 decision, remanding his case to circuit court for a hearing on his request for post-conviction DNA testing. In 2019, after the lower court denied Johnson’s request, the state Supreme Court affirmed the ruling in a 5-2 decision, clearing the way for Johnson’s execution.
Johnson was scheduled to be executed April 20, 2017, as then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson ordered a flurry of executions of eight death row inmates over an 11-day period in an effort to beat the clock on one of the drugs used in the state’s three-drug protocol before it reached its expiration date at the end of April 2017.
In order to beat the deadline, Arkansas scheduled the eight executions to take place between April 17 - 27, 2017, in a two-a-day execution schedule beginning April 17. Three of the inmates, Johnson, Don Davis and Bruce Ward, received stays of execution from the state Supreme Court and remain on death row awaiting execution. One inmate, Jason McGehee, was granted clemency by Hutchinson and his sentence was commuted to life in prison without possibility of parole.
The other four inmates; Ledell Lee, Marcel Williams, Jack Jones and Kenneth Williams, were executed by lethal injection over a seven-day period beginning April 20, 2017.