Arkansas's Drug Lust to Legally Kill

Killing Drugs Dry Up
Arkansas was in a big rush to kill eight men on Death Row before the end of April,  because the drug midazolarn, part of a three-drug killing cocktail, would not be available anymore. Midazolarn is the first of the drugs in Arkansas's death mix. The European Union has banned companies in Europe from selling execution drugs since 2011.

Those languishing on America's Death Rows are generally poor, disproportionately of color, and most likely to have been found guilty of a crime that had a white victim. They are incapable of mounting the type of vigorous defense wealthier defendants can.

Damien Echols knows Arkansas's Death Row all too well: He spent more than 18 years on it after he and two companions were convicted of killing young boys. After improved DNA testing became available years later, he and his two co-defendants were freed in 2011.

In a related development, the McKesson Corporation claimed that the Arkansas Department of Corrections deceived them in order to acquire a bromide, another of the lethal drugs in the state's execution cocktail. [1]

Consent Decrees Under Fire
As much as anyone in the Trump administration, Jeff Sessions seems eager to eradicate any trace of Barack Obama's tenure. According to the Washington Post, "Sessions will work on new policies with a veteran federal prosecutor named Steven H. Cook, who is a long-time enthusiast of the kind of severe drug-war penalties that provoked the mass incarceration crisis in the first place."

Since 1994, seventy police and sheriff's departments have come under investigation; forty-one entered into reform agreements, including consent decrees." "The Justice Department found no systematic abuse in twenty-four of its investigations, and declined to pursue oversight." What this shows is that the Justice Department has not been willy-nilly investigating law enforcement agencies, but, nonetheless, found serious misconduct in well over half of those agencies investigated. Sessions is against consent decrees, because he contends that they undermine morale in police departments and tar officers with the misdeeds of a few rogues. The problem is that a them-against-us culture produces a Blue Wall of Silence by which officers will not bring to light misdeeds of fellow officers. [2]

 "From 2012 through 2015, the Chicago Police Department paid out two hundred and ten million dollars to settle more than six hundred lawsuits, many of them alleging misconduct." Chicago's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, said: "We're on the road to reform. We're not getting off." [3] Just a few months ago, Donald Trump threatened to "send in the feds" to fix Chicago's crime problem. To the hypocrisies of his presidency we may add this one: the dangers in Chicago are compounded by his Attorney General's refusal to do just that. If Obama's proposed criminal justice reforms do not survive the Trump era, the problems they sought to address certainly will.

Big-Tent Feminism
"Like it or not, abortion rights are at tremendous risk right now. A political movement that doesn't defend them and promotes instead some vague notion of 'unity' is bound to be weak too to the women who are the movement's strongest activists. After all, nothing prevents anti-abortion women from being active in other feminist and progressive causes." [4]

"If you demand that every girl and woman who becomes pregnant bear a child no matter the consequences to herself, and if you call on the government to back that up through criminal law, there isn't a lot left to the ideals of equality and self-determination that is fundamental to feminism." "I just don't see how restricting and criminalizing abortion, bullying women on their way into the clinic, and pushing lies -- that abortion will give you breast cancer, make you infertile, or lead to a life's worth of misery -- are compatible with respecting other women's right to make their own moral decisions in an area where people disagree  strongly and probably always will."

Footnotes
[1] Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan, "Arkansas's mass executions facing mass challenge," The Albuquerque Journal, April 22, 2017.

[2] Jelani Cobb, "Reversal of Justice," The New Yorker,  April 24, 2017.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Katha Pollitt, "Too-Big-Tent Feminism," The Nation, March 27, 2017.