By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — The state Supreme Court today halted the executions of three inmates who are challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection in Arkansas.
The high court issued stays for the executions of Jason Farrell McGehee, who was scheduled to die July 26; Bruce Earl Ward, who was scheduled to die Aug. 16; and Marcel Wayne Williams, who was scheduled to die July 12.
The three men are plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in Pulaski County Circuit Court alleging that a 2009 state law authorizing the director of the state Department of Correction to choose the drugs used for lethal injection amounts to an unconstitutional delegation of authority.
The Supreme Court today directed the circuit court to provide it with a status update on the case.
Arkansas has not executed anyone since 2005, in part because of legal challenges to the state’s method of execution. Several other executions have been stayed because of court challenges.
“As we have stated previously, we respect every decision issued by the Supreme Court but are troubled by the court’s reasoning in these cases,” Aaron Sadler, a spokesman for Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, said today.
A clemency hearing and victim input hearing in McGehee’s case were scheduled for today at the state Parole Board’s headquarters in Little Rock.
McGehee was convicted of capital murder and kidnapping in Boone County Circuit Court in the 1996 kidnapping and murder of 15-year-old John Melbourne Jr. Prosecutors said McGehee and accomplices killed Melbourne because they believed he had talked to police about their involvement in stealing and forging checks.
Ward was convicted of capital murder in 1990 in Pulaski County Circuit Court in the 1989 rape and murder of 18-year-old Little Rock convenience store clerk Rebecca Lynn Doss, who was found strangled in the men’s restroom of the store where she worked the night shift alone.
Williams was convicted of capital murder, rape, kidnapping and aggravated robbery in Pulaski County Circuit Court in the 1994 killing of 22-year-old Stacy Errickson of Jacksonville. Errickson was found in a shallow grave near the Arkansas River with her hands bound behind her, two weeks after she was abducted from a gas station where she had stopped to buy gas. The coroner ruled she had been suffocated.
