IT WAS 11.15pm at the Cummins Unit, the facility on the Arkansas plains where death sentences are supposed to be carried out, and the clock was ticking. Not in the usual way, however: rather than the condemned man, Don Davis, seeking an emergency stay, on April 17th the state was asking the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, to lift one. The death warrant would expire at midnight; if it did, Arkansas might be unable to dispatch Mr Davis for the foreseeable future. That is because its supply of a drug it intended to use in a run of eight back-to-back lethal injections—a glut of executions unprecedented in the modern era—will soon expire, too.
The journalists who had been ushered through the electric fences, then past the watch towers and the incongruous rose garden, drew lots to decide who would serve as witnesses. It was unclear whether there was still time for a legal kill. Finally, at a quarter to midnight, the justices declined to lift the stay. Increasingly and chaotically, a gruesome plan that, had it been realised, might have suggested a revival of America’s death penalty, has come instead to seem further evidence of its anachronism.
Arkansas has an unhappy...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2pGU1Ck
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