Killings in Arkansas

Arkansas is killing people because they feel like it.

The state is currently pushing to execute eight prisoners before the drug that it will use to kill them expires.This is the background fact that gives the affair a touch of evil and the sane, civilized observers of the affair a touch of mortal dread¹.

What Arkansas is doing is evil in the sense that it is being “arbitrary and capricious”, a legal term that simply says that there is no reasonable connection between what a person does (or people do) and the given reasons the person is (or people are) doing it². However the officials of Arkansas may want to rationalize their killings of their prisoners, there is no reasonable–or even rational–connection between the killings and the state’s apparent reasons for killing them.

Arkansas is killing these prisoners because it is convenient to kill these prisoners at this time, rather than at the earliest possible time, as justice would seem to require. Or, if you like, Arkansas is killing the prisoners because it would be less convenient for the state to kill them at a later date, even though justice might suggest or require further delay³.

This means the reasons that Arkansas is giving for killing these prisoners at this time have nothing to do with the crimes for which the prisoners have been convicted. They simply don’t. As I understand things, these prisoners have been in process for a very long time, some for as much as twenty years. It is not reasonable that all of the possible legal options of these eight prisoners became exhausted during this two-week period. It is not reasonable that all of their executions being carried out in the most efficient manner landed all of them on the schedule during this same brief period of time.

Therefore, on the one hand, at least some of these prisoners were left to languish in their condemnation until Arkansas saw fit to kill them, which strongly suggests that someone or some people thought it appropriate to extend the torture of pending death. In a civilized world, this would seem to cross a line into vendetta and thereby into the realm of cruel and unusual punishment. Vendetta is what laws exist, however imperfectly, to prevent.

On the other hand, if all possible legal options have not been exhausted for the remaining prisoners who, as of this writing, are still alive, then it seems at least reasonable that the State of Arkansas is killing prisoners without satisfying the requirements of due process which can only mean that Arkansas is killing prisoners arbitrarily and capriciously. This makes the behavior of the State of Arkansas in killing these prisoners no better than the behaviors for which these prisoners were condemned.

Of course, if due process has run its natural course and all of these prisoners came to the point of having absolutely no reasonable protection from being killed at this time, then everything that has been said against these executions does not amount to a hill of beans.

Of course, also, if due process has not yet run its course, or ran its course sometime ago, then Arkansas is killing prisoners at this time simply because of convenience or because it just feels like it, which is not one iota different or less heinous than the crimes of the prisoners whom the State of Arkansas is punishing with death.

Over the last several decades, the number of prisoners who were released after being condemned to die is in the hundreds, approaching thousands. The number of prisoners who were killed and then shown to have been wrongly killed by a member state of the United States of America is in the dozens, approaching hundreds. There is no better argument for reasonable doubt and exhausting due process.

States should not be permitted to kill people as a matter of convenience any more than individuals are permitted to do, unless we are going to accept that a state’s authority supersedes the mandates of decency and civilization binding on individuals.

The United States Supreme Court agreed Thursday that Arkansas is behaving properly in executing at least one of these eight prisoners. It would be extremely reassuring to me, at least, to know that the timing of this particular killing had no relation to the freshness date stamped on the supply of drugs used to kill him. I sincerely hope that this was the case and I sincerely hope the coincidence of any future executions will be clearly and firmly stated prior to Arkansas killing any more prisoners at this time.

It is my understanding that the United States Supreme Court exists, at least in part, to offer a forum where reasonable doubt can be considered with the least possible bias. Perhaps I am mistaken. If the Supreme Court found the State of Arkansas’ convenience a sufficient reason to kill its prisoners at this time, then, in the opinion of the United States Supreme Court, the difference between the State of Arkansas killing people in its prisons and killing people in its streets is one only of degree.

All that is necessary is for Arkansas to find it expedient to kill people in the street and it, with the blessing of the United States Supreme Court, may very well kill people in its streets⁴. This sounds bizarre on its face, but what should be even more disturbing is that whatever legal barrier was in place to ensure this sort of arbitrary killing by a state does not happen may very well have been removed by this Supreme Court decision.

It’s time, before it’s too late, for Arkansas to make clear why it is killing these prisoners at this time. Its reputation depends on it.

Here is the contact information of the Senators Cotton and Boozman and Representatives Crawford, Hill, Womack, and Westerman, as well as the Senate and House of the State of Arkansas and the Governor’s Office.

1. This is the same feeling of dread I think any sane person would have at the story of Pam Bondi, the current Attorney General of Florida, who asked for a delay of the execution of a Florida prisoner so she could attend a fund raiser. No one I know of is permitted, under any circumstances whatsoever, to presume that he or she can dispose of another human life at his or her convenience or whim without risk of dire consequences. Except Pam Bondi. I suppose there are those who will assume that her authority somehow protects her from accountability. I don’t. And her authority protects her only so far and only so long as it it respected.
   
2. You can find definitions here, here, here, and here, among many others. They all say the same thing: You must have an acceptable reason for doing what you do. In the case of murder, there simply is no acceptable reason, which is as it should be. But, even so, the legal process that produces a conviction for murder must continuously re-affirm the reasonableness of the rendered decision or it risks the same capriciousness that produced the crime.
   
3. In addition to the expiration date of the drugs, it seems there is an expiration date for the death warrants issued for the prisoners. For the prisoner named Ledell Lee, executed Friday, April 21, 2017, his death warrant expired four minutes after he was declared dead.

   There is much I do not know about the minutiae of law, but the fact that a death warrant has an expiration date strongly suggests to me that, even when ordered by the court to die, a benefit of the doubt is being observed for the sake of the condemned, perhaps for the sake of civilized decency as well.

   In other words, if the state is not able to carry out an execution in the time allotted, perhaps it is because there exists sufficient reason the execution should not be carried out even though the reason has not yet seen the light of day. In other words, even under these most deliberative circumstances, the court seems to remain willing to be found in error, even if for an as-yet-unknown reason only suggested by the fact that the death warrant expired.
   

4. This is why it is so important to distinguish between a strong opinion and a principled opinion. Arkansas has the strong opinion that it must kill people before its means of administering death expires. The unease that so many feel about the timing of these executions is in the lack of a principled opinion that should be guiding Arkansas. The difference between a principled opinion and a strong one is, in my humble opinion, also precisely the difference between a court of law, with its due process, and a lynch mob.