The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Lee's execution about a half-hour before his death warrant was set to expire at midnight, reports CBS Little Rock affiliate KTHV-TV.
The Arkansas Department of Correction reported that Lee requested Holy Communion as his last meal Thursday night. Lee was pronounced dead at 11:56 p.m., Arkansas Department of Correction Director Wendy Kelly said.
Other legal petitions surrounded Arkansas's use of midazolam, the controversial sedative that has been blamed for botched executions in states including Arizona and Oklahoma, and others questioned the state's hasty execution schedule, which shortened the defendants' time for measures such as clemency reviews.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said he took issue with the state trying to use the drugs before their expiration date. Lee was sentenced to death after being convicted of killing Debra Reese with a tire iron in February 1993 in Jacksonville. Rutledge's office said the attorney general would not appeal that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The five Court conservatives (John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, in addition to Gorsuch) who gave the green light for the execution of Lee (and soon to be four others) did not offer any opinion for their decision.
The execution is part of Arkansas' legally contested plan to execute eight inmates by the end of the month.
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Arkansas carried out an execution Thursday using the drugs after the state Supreme Court reversed a judge's order that had halted the use of the vecuronium bromide. But Arkansas wants to put two other inmates to death Monday, and one next Thursday.
Whether or not Lee would actually be executed was up in the air all day and well into the night on Thursday. "Justice was carried out". The justices voted 5-4 to reject an emergency application brought by several inmates before Arkansas executed convicted murderer Ledell Lee. Four of the planned executions so far have been stayed, but the state still has plans to kill three more men before the end of the month: Kenneth D. Williams and Jack Harold Jones on April 24 and Marcel W. Williams on April 27.
Arkansas' protocol calls for use of midazolam to render the inmate unconscious, vecuronium bromide to stop breathing and potassium chloride to stop the heart.
"In preparation for their scheduled executions, Johnson and Lee were moved Tuesday to the Cummins Unit, the location of the state's execution chamber, a prisons spokesman said Wednesday". They argued that one of the three drugs used during lethal injections doesn't prevent a painful death. It also corrects the spelling of vecuronium bromide in one instance. McKesson's contract with the manufacturer barred sales when the drugs were going to be used in executions, the company stated. The number of executions (20) in 2016 reached the lowest level recorded in any year since 1991.
"I don't know what the state is thinking, but just because this one appears to have gone off without a hitch doesn't meant that there are not problems", said Dale Baich, an assistant federal public defender who witnessed Joseph Rudolph Wood's slow death in a lethal injection that involved midazolam in 2014 in Arizona.
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