By Chuck Bartels
Associated Press
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A group of death row inmates won a court judgment Friday that temporarily blocks executions in Arkansas and says the state Legislature gave too much authority to the Correction Department when it designated the agency director as the person who picks the drug for lethal injections.
A law passed last year specified that the state kill inmates by using a barbiturate but did not specify which one.
Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Wendell Griffen ruled from the bench after an hour-long hearing, granting the request by nine death row inmates and ensuring the state can’t conduct an execution as the matter continues to wind through the courts.
Arkansas has no scheduled executions and hasn’t executed an inmate since 2005.
The inmates raised two issues and won on one of them. Griffen granted a request by the state to throw out the other issue, in which the inmates argued that they couldn’t be executed under the 2013 law because it wasn’t in force at the time of their crimes.
Griffen found that the 2013 law was administrative in nature and not a sentencing law and therefore would still apply. The state argued the actual sentence was covered by the capital murder statute.
Jeff Rosenzweig, a lawyer for the death row inmates, said he expects both sides will appeal the elements they lost to the Arkansas Supreme Court. Lawyers for the Arkansas attorney general’s office didn’t comment after Griffen’s ruling.
“My major problem,” Griffen said, "... is what I see as an absence of guidelines.”
The law didn’t specify training for Correction Department staff who would conduct the executions and lacked the specificity of a 1983 law that said the state should administer a short-acting barbiturate to kill an inmate.
Attorney Josh Lee, also representing the inmates, argued that there is no assurance in the law that an execution would be “swift and humane.”
Assistant Attorney General David Curran argued that a law only has to go so far in detailing procedures. He said the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment would ensure executions are carried out properly and that the state can trust the Correction Department director “to do the right thing.”