Arkansas’ attorney general and governor are vowing to pursue a series of executions scheduled over the next two weeks even after the state’s Supreme Court halted the first two lethal injections hours before they were to take place.
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said she will continue to seek justice for the families of victims and pursue two executions scheduled for tomorrow, a pair set for Monday next week and one planned for Thursday next week.
“I will continue to respond to any and all legal challenges brought by the prisoners,” she said in a statement late on Monday.
“The families have waited far too long to see justice, and I will continue to make that a priority,” she said.
Rutledge’s statement came moments after the US Supreme Court denied her request to vacate a stay issued by the Arkansas Supreme Court on the execution that was scheduled on Monday for Don Davis, sentenced to die for the 1990 slaying of Jane Daniel, 62, during a home burglary.
“It is heartbreaking that the family of Jane Daniel has once again seen justice delayed,” Rutledge said in a statement.
The legal fight in Arkansas, which previously put someone to death 12 years ago, came after the number of US executions fell to a quarter-century low last year. Capital punishment in several states was stymied by problems with lethal-injection drugs and legal questions over their protocols.
Davis and fellow inmate Bruce Ward, both of whom have spent more than 20 years on death row, were scheduled to die on Monday night before the Arkansas Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, stayed the executions after their lawyers raised questions about their mental competency.
Rutledge’s office declined to challenge the stay ordered for Ward.
“While this has been an exhausting day for all involved, tomorrow we will continue to fight back on last-minute appeals and efforts to block justice for the victims’ families,” said Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson said in a statement.
In a separate ruling on Monday, the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals in St Louis overruled a lower-court decision that had blocked the state’s original plan to put eight inmates to death.
On April 6, US District Judge J.P. Marshall halted one of the executions, saying the expedited schedule did not allow proper time for considering clemency for inmate Jason McGehee, who is one of the inmates set to die next week.
The state said it had to act quickly, because one of the drugs in its difficult-to-obtain lethal injection mix, the valium-like sedative midazolam, expires at the end of this month.
Attorneys for the eight were likely to appeal the federal appeals court ruling to the US Supreme Court. They filed a separate petition for stays on Monday with the US Supreme Court over a procedural matter.
The state also argued that US District Judge Kristine Baker on Saturday abused her discretion when she ruled about potential harm from midazolam.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema