Method
For all people sentenced after 4 July 1983, the method used is the lethal injection. Under state law:
- "The punishment of death is to be administered by a continuous intravenous injection of a lethal quantity of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic agent…"
If the person was sentenced before that date, they have the choice of the electric chair or lethal injection. However, since no inmates are eligible for that method, the electric chair has all but been retired for use in volunteers to be used.
If lethal injection is ever ruled unconstitutional, the electric chair can be used for all death sentences.
Clemency rests with the governor of Arkansas, who receives a non-binding report from the Arkansas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Executions in Arkansas are currently performed at the Cummins Unit.
As in any other state, people who are under 18 at the time of commission of the capital crime or mentally retarded are constitutionally precluded from being executed.
Juveniles can be tried as adults at the age of 14 for capital murder.
Read more about this topic: Capital Punishment In Arkansas
Famous quotes containing the word method:
“As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be, subject to correction, but that goes without saying.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)