26 April 2017 :
Two inmates received lethal injections on the same gurney Monday night about three hours apart. The second was Marcel Williams, 46, Black. Attorneys for Williams convinced a federal judge to briefly delay his punishment over concerns about how the earlier one was carried out. They claimed Jack Jones gasped for air, an account the state's attorney general denied. The judge lifted her stay about an hour later and Williams was pronounced dead at 10:33 p.m.. In the emergency filing, Williams' attorneys wrote that officials spent 45 minutes trying to place an IV line in Jones' neck before placing it elsewhere. It argued that Williams, who weighs 400 pounds, could face a "torturous" death because of his weight. Williams was already in the death chamber when the temporary stay was issued. He was escorted out of the chamber and used the restroom, then was brought back in after the stay was lifted. Besides the two executions Monday, Arkansas put to death one other inmate last week and has a final one scheduled for Thursday.
Four others have been blocked.
Williams was sentenced to death on January 14, 1997 in Pulaski County for the November 20, 1994 rape and killing of Stacy Errickson, 22, White. Prosecutors say Williams abducted the young mother when she stopped for gas in Jacksonville, drove her to various ATMs and forced her take out about $350. Her beaten and bound body was found in a park two weeks later. Williams admitted having abducted Errickson from the convenience store and robbing her through ATM withdrawals. However, he denied any sexual assault and assured the officers that to the best of his knowledge Errickson was alive. Appellant attempted to implicate others as accomplices asserting that they were the ones responsible for physically harming her. Authorities said Williams abducted and raped two other women in the days before he was arrested in Errickson's death. Williams admitted responsibility to the state Parole Board last month.
The last state to put more than one inmate to death on the same day was Texas, which executed two killers in August 2000. Oklahoma planned a double execution in 2014 but scrapped plans for the second one after the execution of Clayton Lockett went awry. Williams becomes the 3rd inmate to be executed this year in Arkansas, the 30th since the state resumed executions in 1990, the 9th this year in the Usa, and the n° 1451 since the Usa resumed executions in 1977.
