Last-minute drama as Arkansas carries out nation’s first double execution since 2000

Arkansas executed two convicted killers scheduled to die by lethal injection Monday night after a brief flurry of legal wrangling by attorneys who claimed the first execution was botched.

Their deaths marked the nation’s first-double execution since 2000, when Texas put condemned inmates to death on the same night.

A federal judge in Little Rock had temporarily halted the execution of inmate Marcel Williams after his attorneys questioned whether the night’s earlier execution of Jack Harold Jones, 52, went properly.

But it was a short reprieve. U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker lifted her stay after about an hour paving the way for the 10:33 p.m. CT execution of Williams. His death warrant had been due to expire at midnight CT.

Williams was pronounced dead 17 minutes after the procedure began at the Cummins Unit in southeast Arkansas.

Williams’ attorneys said in an emergency filing late Monday that it took 45 minutes for prison staff to place an IV into Jones, possibly because of his overweight frame. Intravenous lines are placed before witnesses are allowed access to the death chamber.

They also said in court papers that Jones moved his lips and was “gulping for air” after the first drug was administered. The attorneys argued that Williams, 46, who was also obese, could face a “torturous death.”

Arkansas Deputy Solicitor General Nicholas J. Bronni wrote in a court motion Monday night that "there was no constitutional violation in Jones' execution."

"The claim that Jones was moving his lips and gulping for air is unsupported by press accounts or the accounts of other witnesses," Bronni wrote in the motion, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

An Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution said Jones moved his lips briefly after the midazolam was administered, and officials put a tongue depressor in his mouth intermittently for the first few minutes. His chest stopped moving two minutes after they checked for consciousness, and he was pronounced dead at 7:20 p.m.

Jones, who’d argued that his health conditions could lead to a painful death, gave a lengthy last statement. His final words were: “I’m sorry.”

“I hope over time you can learn who I really am and I am not a monster,” he said in the roughly 2-minute statement.

The attorneys’ last-minute filing said Jones showed “continued consciousness” after the drug midazolam was administered.

Earlier in the evening, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request for a stay of execution for Williams.

Jones was convicted in the 1995 rape and murder of a mother in front of her young daughter.

Jones also issued a written statement before he died, expressing remorse for his crime and saying he tried to reform himself while behind bars, KARK-TV reported. "I made every effort to be a good person - I practiced Buddhism and studied physics," the note said, according to the news organization. "There are no words that could fully express my remorse for the pain that I caused."

Jones and Williams are among eight inmates who were scheduled to be put to death in Arkansas before the April 30 expiration of one of three drugs used in its lethal injection protocol. The situation has drawn condemnation from across the country, as critics assert that the rush to put the inmates to death is preventing them from adequate legal review.

Both men were served last meals on Monday afternoon, Arkansas Department of Correction spokesman Solomon Graves said. Jones had fried chicken, potato logs with tartar sauce, beef jerky bites, three candy bars, a chocolate milkshake and fruit punch. Williams had fried chicken, banana pudding, nachos, two sodas and potato logs with ketchup, Graves said.

One of the eight inmates, convicted murderer Ledell Lee, was put to death Thursday.  Last Monday, the Arkansas Supreme Court granted a reprieve for two other of the condemned inmates — Don Davis and Bruce Ward — based on claims about their mental health, as well as a debate over whether expert witnesses can testify for both parties in a case.

Lawyers for Jones argued that their client should not be put to death because diabetes, hypertension and many narcotics prescribed to him over the years would mean that “he is likely to be either not rendered unconscious and thus suffer a painful death in violation of the Eighth Amendment, or be left alive but brain damaged.”

Jones was convicted in the 1995 rape and murder of Mary Phillips, a 34-year-old mother, in front of her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy, and the attempted murder of the girl. Phillips was found naked from the waist down with the cord from a coffee pot wrapped around her neck. As police crime photographers took pictures of the murder scene and assumed Lacy was dead, the girl woke up. She helped solve the case.

The high court stepped in to review the case of Williams after the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas on Monday rejected a request to reopen Williams’ federal murder case because his lawyers failed to introduce to the jury details of his troubled childhood.

Williams’ trial lawyers failed to investigate and present to the jury details of his “nightmarish” childhood and made many other “numerous” mistakes during his capital murder trial, according to Laura Burstein, communications consultant with the Squire Patton Boggs law firm based in Cleveland.

According to Williams’ clemency petition, his mother subjected him to “extremely severe” abuse and would “sit astride him and pummel him with her fists.” When Williams was 13, his mother poured boiling water on him, leaving him with burns up and down his arm, according to the petition. At least once, she heated up extension cords in boiling water and beat him naked with the cords “until he was covered in gashes,” the petition indicated. She once beat him so severely that his bed collapsed and he ran outside naked, according to the petition.

On the morning of Nov. 20, 1994 in Jacksonville, Ark., Williams forced motorist Stacy Errickson, 22, at gunpoint into the passenger seat of her car at a gas station and forced her to withdraw money from 18 automatic teller machines for a sum totaling $350. Errickson did not make it to work that day and did not pick up her child from the babysitter. Her body was found in a shallow grave on Dec. 5. Williams was sentenced to death in 1995.

The state of Arkansas earlier opposed both stay requests.

In the case of Williams, it wrote that the convict “has a long (and all too often successful) history of using piecemeal and dilatory litigation to manipulate the judicial process and prevent Arkansas from carrying out his just and lawful execution. This case is simply the latest, textbook example of those tactics.”

The state responded similarly to Jones’ request for a stay, writing that it “represents another dilatory and piecemeal-litigation tactic designed to delay his lawful execution. Petitioner has done all he can to manipulate the judicial process and prevent Arkansas from carrying out his just and lawful executions.”

At 4 p.m. Arkansas time, 5 p.m. ET, representatives for the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty delivered a petition with 46,000 signatures to the office of Gov. Asa Hutchinson opposing the rushed plan to execute the Arkansas inmates. All together, 204,000 people contacted the governor’s office opposing the executions, the organization said. It was working in conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Catholic Mobilizing and Equal Justice USA.

Contributing: The Associated Press

As executions loom, Supreme Court splits on mental health claims