A new law that keeps the source of Arkansas' execution drugs a secret is a contract-breaker and that makes it illegal, seven Arkansas death-row inmates contend in a lawsuit filed Monday.

The convicted killers argue in their 27-page suit in Pulaski County Circuit Court that they are entitled to know where the drugs come from to review their effectiveness. The case has yet to be assigned to a judge.

Inmate attorney Jeff Rosenzweig said the law, signed Monday by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, violates a 2013 contract that the attorney general, on behalf of the state, made with the inmates.

In exchange for keeping the prisoners and their legal counsel informed about the drugs that would be used, the inmates withdrew parts of a previous lawsuit, the agreement states.

"The state promised to provide us with information as to the source and content of the drugs which it plans to use to execute persons," Rosenzweig said in a release announcing the litigation. "This law blatantly reneges on that agreement."

A spokesman for Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge declined to comment since she has not seen the lawsuit. The agreement was approved by her predecessor, Dustin McDaniel.

The inmates want the Arkansas Department of Correction, which manages the execution process, to be court-ordered to disclose where the drugs are coming from, and they want the court to strike down the new death-penalty law.

The prisoners also want the court to bar any coming executions until the lawsuit is resolved, meaning the lawsuit has the potential to put a judicial freeze on capital punishment, 18 days after the state Supreme Court dissolved the last hold preventing executions.

The high court in March validated the Legislature's 2013 rewrite of the lethal-injection law, overturning the findings of a lower court that had ruled in response to the previous inmate lawsuit that the reworking of the law was unconstitutional in February 2014.

Arkansas executions have been on hold because of state and federal litigation for about 10 years.

Since 2008, three state lawsuits by Arkansas inmates challenging secrecy provisions in the death-penalty process have prevented the state from applying the punishment.

To counter litigation or to adapt to court rulings, the Legislature has had to rewrite sections of the law.

Monday's suit was filed shortly after Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed House Bill 1751 into law.

Before signing, he repeated his support for the changes -- noting "confidentiality" provisions -- but predicted the courts would have to review them before executions can resume. "It provides some clarity, it provides some protections, some confidentiality," Hutchinson said. "But there's a long, many steps to go, working with the attorney general, working with the Department of Correction to implement those procedures, and also get the protocols in place and to work with the courts on it. The courts are gonna review these things. We'll take one step at a time."

The measure, which establishes what drugs would be used to execute inmates and how they should be applied, exempts from public disclosure "the entities and persons who compound, test, sell, or supply the drug or drugs, medical supplies, or medical equipment for the execution process."

Rosenzweig said that exemption, negating the inmates' contract, "is explicitly barred by the Arkansas Constitution and numerous judicial decisions."

He predicted that the courts would side with the inmates and said no one who supplies execution drugs to Arkansas should rely on promises that their identities would not be disclosed.

"No court is going to allow the state to go back on its agreement. No pharmacist should rely on the anonymity this bill purports to provide," he said. "Any pharmacist's identity certainly will be revealed in the course of this litigation. The prisoners, the press and the citizenry of Arkansas are entitled to know the drugs that the state intends to use in its executions. The vetting of compounded drugs necessarily entails the vetting of the compounding pharmacy."

Complaints about the source of the execution drugs and their effectiveness was raised in 2013 during inmate litigation, with the prisoners claiming the drugs the state planned on using would be more likely to inflict brain damage than death.

In 2011 litigation, death-row inmates complained that Arkansas had gotten a key execution drug from a "ramshackle" British driving school and questioned whether the medications would work.

Rosenzweig warned legislators in writing and in testimony last month that passing the secrecy measure, HB1751, would violate the contract and prompt a lawsuit as soon as the governor signed the bill into law.

The lawyers had already drafted the suit, he said in a March 27 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The two-page contract was signed in June 2013 by Brad Phelps, chief deputy attorney general under the previous administration.

The inmates, represented by Rosenzweig and federal Public Defender Josh Lee, are Stacey Eugene Johnson, 45, sentenced in 1994 in Sevier County; Jack Harold Jones, 50, sentenced in 1996 in White County; Jason McGehee, 38, 1998, Boone County; Terrick Terrell Nooner, 44, 1993, Pulaski County; Bruce Earl Ward, 58, 1990, Pulaski County; Kenneth Dewayne Williams, 36, 2000, Lincoln County; and Marcel Wayne Williams, 44, 1997, Pulaski County.

The defendants are Correction Department Director Wendy Kelley, who is personally responsible for procuring the execution drugs, and the department itself.

"I cannot comment at this time because it's pending litigation," Kelley said during a Board of Corrections meeting at the Arkansas Correctional School Central Office in Pine Bluff.

Information for this report was provided by Jeannie Roberts and Spencer Willems of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Metro on 04/07/2015