Arkansas carries out first of several planned executions, but what’s next?

This week in Arkansas, lives came down to minutes.

Ledell Lee never saw Friday. Less than an hour before a midnight deadline to carry out the sentence, Arkansas officials learned the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected his last appeals. The lethal injection began and Lee was dead by 11:56 p.m. Thursday — the first execution in the state since 2005.

Earlier in the week, Don Davis and Bruce Earl Ward saw the clock expire as courts halted their executions just before midnight Monday. Stacey Johnson got a reprieve Thursday as well.

Arkansas planned to execute eight convicted murderers over 11 days this month and the state will try again next week, with two scheduled for Monday and one on Thursday. A fourth scheduled for Thursday currently has a stay in place.

The pace and volume of executions has troubled capital punishment opponents — though they took heart this week when the scheduled executions were stopped and when Johnson’s case was stayed.

Lee’s execution was a blow, however.

Nina Morrison, a lawyer with the Innocence Project, worked until the last moments leading up to Lee’s execution and said the grim spectacle that played out in Arkansas was unlike anything she’d seen in her 17 years of practicing law and working capital punishment cases.

“Nobody can look at what happened in Arkansas and feel proud,” Morrison said. “It was a rushed, unfair and arbitrary process and we deserve better. The families of the victims deserve better, the courts deserve better and the defendants’ lives we have in our hands deserve better.”

Lee was convicted in the 1993 murder of 26-year-old Debra Reese, the mother of a 6-year-old boy. She was robbed and strangled in her Jacksonville, Ark., home. Prosecutors said Lee then beat her 36 times with a bat-like tire “thumper” her husband had given her for protection.

Prosecutors came forward with evidence that Lee had previously committed violent crimes against several other women, though he maintained his innocence until his death.

But Morrison said the request for delaying Lee’s execution centered on the need for DNA testing that hadn’t previously been available and that justice demanded it to ensure an innocent man wasn’t put to death.

The flurry of legal challenges was seen by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Atty. Gen. Leslie Rutledge as a stalling tactic to delay justice. A spokesman for Rutledge said Friday that it was impossible to know if the scheduled executions of Marcel Williams and Jack Jones on Monday would mirror this week’s frantic pace.

J.R. Davis, spokesman for Hutchinson, said the men facing execution already have had plenty of time to appeal and fight their cases.

“You start to worry whether or not this is a big hit on the judicial system. You have all these last-minute appeals that are essentially thrown up against the wall to see what sticks,” Davis said. “These cases have been going on for decades — and that is part of the process. You want to make sure a person is guilty of the crime so you have the appeals set in place and there was time for that.”

Arkansas Department of Corrections spokesperson Solomon Graves awaits news from the death chamber.

(Kelly P. Kissel / AP)

But some of the legal challenges to Lee’s execution were focused on the methodology of the execution — namely the drugs used during lethal injections.

The state’s supply of one, midazolam, expires April 30. McKesson Corp. had filed for a temporary restraining order last week to keep Arkansas from using its product, vecuronium bromide, after the company said it had been misled because the state had never said it planned to use the drug in executions.

A temporary restraining order was put into place on April 14, but three days later the state Supreme Court removed it, agreeing with Rutledge that the judge who issued it was biased because he had attended an anti-death penalty protest.

McKesson filed for a new restraining order, which was approved Wednesday but then removed Thursday afternoon by the state Supreme Court.

“We believe we have done all we can do at this time to recover our product,” the company said in a statement lamenting the ruling.

Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina, said the drug manufacturer’s unwillingness to be involved with products used for the death penalty may be a way capital punishment becomes a less viable form of justice as options diminish.

He said boycotts of companies that deal in drugs related to executions can make supplies for the states even harder to obtain and that it’s a tactic that may be more effective than seeking to abolish the death penalty through the legislative process.

The lack of supply has already hamstrung other states trying to conduct executions. In Nevada, an $860,000 execution chamber was built last year after being approved the Legislature in 2015, but it has yet to be used because the state can’t obtain the drugs used for lethal injections.

Arkansas’ rush to complete its execution schedule — April 17 through 27 — was set by Hutchinson in February when it was clear the drug would expire April 30.

Davis, the governor’s spokesman, said the dates were important for the families of the murder victims to see the will of juries carried out.

Lee’s execution, he said, was justice.

Lee had a last meal of fruit punch, four slices of bread, two cinnamon rolls, stewed tomatoes, sweet rice, corn and two pieces of fried chicken. He took Holy Communion and did not have any last words.

The two scheduled to die Monday are Marcel Williams and Jones. Williams, 46, was convicted of the 1994 rape and murder of 22-year-old Stacy Errickson. Jones, 52, was convicted of the murder of a bookkeeper, Mary Phillips, in 1995.

One of the men scheduled to die Thursday, Jason McGehee, 40, currently has a stay in place and is unlikely to face execution because the legal process would extend beyond the April 30 deadline.

Public support for capital punishment, which peaked in the mid-1990s, when 80% of Americans favored the death penalty, is now at its lowest level since 1972, according to the Pew Research Center. Its poll in September showed 49% of Americans supported executions for convicted murderers.

The debate is expected to continue as Arkansas begins the process again Monday. And like last week, vigils are planned outside the governor’s mansion in Little Rock on Monday and Thursday.

The Rev. Steve Copley, chairman of the Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said he will be praying Sunday in church and will be attending the protests Monday.

“I’ll be remembering the victims and family of the victims, but also remembering those on death row and the attorneys trying to make sure life isn’t taken from them,” Copley said. “I’ll be praying to ask God to be in the midst of this situation as it happens.”

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Twitter: @davemontero

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UPDATES:

5:15 p.m.: This article was updated to report Lee’s last meal.

This article was originally published at 3:35 p.m.