On April 17, the state of Arkansas plans to kill Don Davis and Bruce Earl Ward, two men who have been on death row since the early 1990s. Neither has applied for clemency. Both will die on the same gurney, back to back, if all goes according to plan. Executioners will start by injecting them with a sedative called midazolam, never before used by the state, but which is supposed to render them unconscious for the two lethal drugs to follow. No one, apart from a handful of officials, knows where the drugs will come from, or who exactly will do the injecting. Those are secrets under the law. Most importantly, no one knows how well the midazolam will work, if it works at all. After nearly 12 years without a single execution, Arkansas is embarking on a kind of human experiment. If there are risks to this plan, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson has wasted little time contemplating them. Three nights after the double execution, Ledell Lee and Stacey Johnson are scheduled to die the same way, on April 20, followed by another two men, Marcel Williams and Jack Jones Jr., on April 24. Finally, if all goes according to plan, Kenneth Williams will be executed on the 27th. An eighth man, Jason McGehee, was supposed to die with him, but this week he was granted a reprieve. As it now stands, seven men will die in the Arkansas death house this month, over the course of 11 days. The sudden rush to execute stems from a practical dilemma: Arkansas’s supply of midazolam is set to expire at the end of the month. If the governor lets that happen, officials will have to find a new supply of drugs for lethal injection, an increasingly challenging task that has kept executions on hold for years. In the years since the state’s last execution, officials seem to be getting rusty, even when it comes to basic PR. Facing a shortage of necessary witnesses for its upcoming executions, Department of Corrections Director Wendy Kelly asked startled members of a Little Rock rotary club last month if anyone would be willing to attend the executions. “It quickly became obvious that she was not kidding,” one man said.

Photo: Danny Johnston/AP

If Arkansas officials now find themselves in uncharted waters, they are also reviving an old local tradition. It was not so long ago that prisoners were once executed two and three at a time, using techniques believed to be humane, even cutting edge, despite signs to the contrary. As in other death penalty states, generations of politicians in Arkansas have passed law after law mandating experimental new killing tools hastily borrowed from other states, while tasking others to implement them. Governors have ignored red flags, insisting they are bound by law to set execution dates, regardless of circumstance, then discovered things don’t go according to plan. Part of this history can be found at the Arkansas Studies Institute in downtown Little Rock, a modern renovation of two historic buildings on President Clinton Avenue. The vast collection includes boxes of old materials belonging to the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty: decades of prison mail, meeting minutes, and a handful of correspondence with Hutchinson’s predecessors. In one letter, from 1989, Governor Bill Clinton responds to a prominent activist and longtime friend Freddie Nixon, who had urged him to intervene on behalf of a black man on death row named Barry Lee Fairchild, whom many believed to be innocent. “As you know our positions differ,” Clinton wrote back, “and I ask that you respect the prayer and deliberation on which mine is based.” Clinton restarted executions in 1990, ending a 26-year stretch without any deaths in the Arkansas death chamber. A bloody era followed. In January 1994, the state executed two men in a single night — a first in the country’s so-called “modern” death penalty period. A few months later, Nixon and her husband sent a letter to Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, with another urgent appeal. “Once again we are writing to you to request that you grant clemency to persons on Arkansas’ Death Row,” they wrote in July 1994. “The situation this time is even more extraordinary than the last.” The double execution had been “gruesome enough,” they continued. “This time, three are scheduled to die and all for one crime. What kind of justice requires three deaths? Please do not let Arkansas become another ‘Killing Field.’ Grant clemency to Darryl Richley, Hoyt Clines and James Holmes.” The Nixons were not alone in seeking to halt the triple execution. The ACLU decried “the horrifying and barbaric spectacle of Arkansas’ ‘final solution’ to crime.” The NAACP Legal Defense Fund called it “disturbingly paradigmatic of an era when African-Americans were too often the victims of mass lynchings.” Protests were held, and vigils organized at the governor’s mansion. Nevertheless, Governor Tucker denied clemency. Within a span of two and a half hours on the night of August 3, 1994, Richley, Clines, and Holmes were killed by lethal injection at the Cummins Unit, less than 80 miles southeast of Little Rock. Arkansas carried out another triple execution in 1997, under Governor Mike Huckabee. This was the death penalty at its peak in the United States — it has been declining ever since. Arkansas has not executed anyone since 2005, and much has changed in meantime. While the U.S. Supreme Court has twice upheld lethal injection in the past ten years, a slew of botched executions across the country have shown it to be inherently unreliable — no matter what drugs are used. In 2014, Oklahoma made international headlines after the horrifying execution of Clayton Lockett; executioners had failed to properly insert the IV lines. In an open letter last month, a group of former prison officials reminded Governor Hutchison that a second man had been scheduled to die that same night using midazolam, before things went so horribly wrong. “We believe that performing so many executions in so little time will impose extraordinary and unnecessary stress and trauma on the staff responsible with carrying out the executions,” they wrote. “We haven’t had an execution since this whole controversy over lethal injection controversy came up,” veteran Arkansas defense lawyer Jeff Rosenzweig told me in Little Rock last month. Attorneys for the condemned have raised particular alarm over the planned use of midazolam, which replaces a longtime anesthetic — sodium thiopental — that became unavailable years ago. Midazolam has a short but grisly track record; a complaint filed in federal court last month points to several executions where the sedative appeared to fail, most recently in Alabama, during the execution of Robert Bert Smith, who heaved and coughed as he died. Today Rosenzweig is increasingly convinced lethal injection never really worked as intended, even when sodium thiopental was in ample supply. “Now, they’re not even using that drug, but using a drug which has a history of not working,” he said. Rosenzweig’s office is littered with legal files, his desk barely visible under his workload. On the day we met, one of his clients had just had his bid for clemency rejected by the parole board. Now racing against the clock, Rosenzweig is prepared to be a witness if the time comes. If something goes wrong, it will not be the first time he has seen a botched execution in Arkansas. “We’re headed right for an iceberg with this,” Rosenzweig said. “It ain’t gonna work on some of them.”

An Electric Chair in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in 1915. Photo: T. Fred Robbins/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images

“Like Going to Sleep” Before Arkansas learned to love lethal injection, it first bought into the myth of electrocution as a civilized alternative to hangings. The electric chair would kill instantaneously, its promotors boasted in the late 1800s, with medical experts echoing the claim in the press. Although the country’s first electrocution — carried out in New York in 1890 — was a grisly ordeal, it was nonetheless seen as an advance, a reflection of a more enlightened age. Arguing for a new execution law in 1913, Arkansas lawmakers said the technology would discourage lynchings; executions would now be centralized, going from individual counties across the state to a single death chamber at the state penitentiary. “The substitution of the electric chair for the gallows in Arkansas meets with the very general approval by all citizens,” the St. Louis Dispatch reported in 1913, adding that state sheriffs were “especially pleased.” Hanging convicts had been among their more “undesirable duties,” the paper reported, “and it has never been a good advertisement for a community. Arkansas prison officials were under immediate pressure to adopt the new technology. As the new law came closer to taking effect, the state attorney general pushed it as “an emergency that must be met.” Based in part on New York’s pioneering machinery, an electrician at the University of Arkansas built a homemade electric chair, which was “successfully tested” on a large steer, according to the Arkansas Democrat. A black man named Lee Simms, convicted of raping a white woman, would have “the honor of officially testing the home-made apparatus.” In addition to bringing executions behind prison walls — avoiding the unseemly crowds that gathered at the gallows — Arkansas’ new execution law also made it a crime for newspapers to report on them. “No newspaper or person shall print or publish the details of the execution of criminals under this act,” it read. “Only the fact that the criminal was executed shall be printed or published.” Yet reporters flouted the law for the Simms execution, while taking some creative liberties. He was said to be unafraid, singing as his face was covered by a leather mask before a 2,300-volt current would be sent through his body. Assured he would die painlessly and with dignity, Simms supposedly expressed satisfaction that he was making history. “I’se glad I am the first niggah to be ‘lectrocuted,” he said, according to an account in the Gazette. Afterward, the paper approvingly reported that Simms had died “without the convulsions or twitchings” seen at the gallows. “There is no doubt that executions by electrocution are much less gruesome and horrible than those by hanging.” It did not take long for this lie to be dramatically exposed. Nine years after killing Simms, Arkansas carried out one of the most grotesque executions the country had ever seen. Following the departure of the longtime warden at the state penitentiary, prison officials selected an unidentified “volunteer” executioner — an English car salesman who had taken a correspondence course in electricity, according to a 1922 article in the Arkansas Democrat — who flipped the switch to kill an 18-year-old black man named James Wells. To the horror of witnesses, most of whom fled minutes into the execution, Wells stayed alive over repeated attempts to send lethal currents through his body. On the twelfth try, the young man finally died.

Newspapers decried the spectacle. The Democrat’s editorial page called it a “horrible and revolting disgrace on the state of Arkansas,” calling for experts to carry out executions, and exhorting the governor to ensure that “there are no repetitions of this horrible human butchery.” Yet less than a year later, Arkansas carried out a quadruple execution, only to realize as officials prepared to bury the four men, that one of them was still alive. This time, the press was a bit more matter-of-fact. “He was taken from the coffin and again placed in the electric chair,” according to one report. Despite such ghoulish mishaps, the electric chair prevailed for decades as the country’s preferred execution method, seen as reliable if used responsibly. Arkansas went on to kill 168 people in the chair, sometimes four in the same day. Courts provided legal legitimacy. In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the gruesome execution of a black teenager named Willie Francis in Louisiana, who had been removed from the electric chair after repeated unsuccessful attempts to kill him, then sent back a few days later to die. A majority found no violation of the 8th amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, calling the execution an “innocent misadventure.” In Arkansas, the notion that the electric chair was mostly humane survived well into the 1990s. After the U.S. Supreme Court brought back the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, state officials hired an electrical engineer named Jay Wiechert to build a new and improved electric chair. “Of course, I didn’t know anything about how to do it at the time,” Wiechert later told the Arkansas Times, adding that he found the challenge “interesting.” A new death chamber was constructed from scratch, and a generator had to be installed at the prison, after the Arkansas Power & Light Company said it would prefer not to provide energy for electrocutions. After Bill Clinton set the execution date for John Edward Swindler in 1990, the Arkansas Democrat sought to reacquaint readers with the technology, quoting a university professor who said its effects would be “like going to sleep.” Convicted before Arkansas officially adopted lethal injection, Swindler was given the choice between electrocution and the gurney. He refused to choose, and was electrocuted. It was the first and last time the state used Wiechert’s electric chair. The next man to die chose lethal injection. Wiechert died last year, an obscure figure despite an auspicious legacy: the man whose ad hoc electric chair design was replicated from Ohio to Tennessee. In his last published interview, Wiechert recalled how he came to modernize the electric chair. “Back in the ’70s, the state of Arkansas couldn’t find anybody to build an electric chair,” Wiechert said — a state of affairs with parallels to the difficulty states have obtaining the lethal injection cocktail these days. “They called me and I said, ‘Yeah! I’ll build you an electric chair. How difficult can that be?’ In my business, the hard part is not electrocuting somebody! Killing somebody is a piece of cake.”

Armin Walser, the chemist whose team invented midazolam while working for Hoffmann-La Roche in the 1970s, at home in Tucson, Ariz., on March 9, 2017. Photo: Caitlin O’Hara/New York Times/Redux

“Clinical Death” If lethal injection was supposed to launch executions into the modern age, in reality it was a similarly slapdash invention. Fordham law professor Deborah Denno, the foremost legal expert on the subject, has written extensively about its origins at the hands of Oklahoma medical examiner Jay Chapman, whose concoction spread swiftly despite old warnings against using lethal injection to carry out executions. Government-led commissions in the U.S. and UK had studied and rejected the method, over concerns that it could not be performed efficiently or painlessly. Yet politicians ignored these concerns, emphasizing that lethal injection “appeared more humane and visually palatable relative to other methods,” as Denno wrote in a 2007 article for the Fordham Law Review. That the protocol be “visually palatable” was key. The Oklahoma state senator who first pushed lethal injection in the 1970s found electrocutions gruesome, telling the Tulsa World they were “kind of a combination of Barnum & Bailey and reform.” Showing graphic post-electrocution photos to fellow lawmakers, he unsuccessfully sought the help of his own physician, who was the head of the Oklahoma Medical Association, then turned to Chapman, asking if he might design a lethal injection formula. As Denno recounts, Chapman admitted he did not know much about how to kill people, although he had examined plenty of homicide victims. “To hell with them,” he said about members of the medical community who might disapprove. “Let’s do this.” How to implement Chapman’s “three-drug cocktail” would be a matter largely decided by Texas Department of Corrections director W.J. Estelle, whose state was the first to adopt lethal injection. One AP report described how Estelle decided prisoners should be strapped down on a hospital gurney, rather than the old electric chair. (A prison chaplain who had seen 14 electrocutions wanted them “carried out in a nice clean room, something that doesn’t look like a prison.”) Guided by “unnamed consultants,” Estelle was also given the choice of three different drugs to kick off the three-drug protocol — one was a “muscle relaxant,” another a “contact poison.” Estelle chose sodium thiopental, a fast-acting barbiturate used for general anesthesia. A prison spokesman said death would come “within minutes.” A 40-year-old man named Charlie Brooks Jr. was the first to die by lethal injection. One media witness described how he “gasped and wheezed,” but no one seemed to make much of it. The Texas model was replicated across the country: the first drug (generally sodium thiopental) anesthetized the prisoner. The second (pancuronium bromide) caused paralysis, including of the muscles used for respiration. And the third (potassium chloride) stopped the heart. The second drug was mostly cosmetic; Chapman had included it to conceal the effects of the fatal doses on bodies of the condemned. But it also introduced a fatal flaw that went undiscussed among prison officials, who had no grasp of the properties of the drugs they were administering: If the anesthetic didn’t work as intended, its effect was to suffocate the person on the gurney; once the third drug kicked in, the third drug would induce a heart attack. In all, the experience would be agonizing – yet the paralytic would prevent him or her from signaling their suffering. It took Arkansas several years to implement lethal injection. In 1970, four years after the state’s last execution, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller had commuted the death sentences of all 15 men on death row. But by 1977, Arkansas lawmakers hoped to start killing again. Officials approved $75,000 to build a new execution chamber, designed to accommodate both electrocution and lethal injection, or “clinical death,” as some put it. It would be built by prisoners. The Arkansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty explored a lawsuit to block the project, in part by arguing that the use of convict labor was unconstitutional, but were dissuaded by attorneys, who said it would be costly, and sure to fail. Even if a willing plaintiff were found, “prisoners under sentence can be required to work,” one lawyer wrote. Besides, those constructing the death chamber “are receiving benefit in the form of good time off of their sentence at a rate of one day off for each day served.” In 1979, Thomas Carpenter of the Arkansas ACLU urged abolitionists to fight the new method, even if it seemed more humane. “At first blush it may seem that this is good legislation in that if the death penalty is to exist in this state, then the least barbarous method should be used,” he wrote. “However, if the horror of killing people is removed in this method, it will become much easier for most people to be complacent about killing people.”

Photo: Danny Johnston/AP