[JURIST] Nine Arkansas death row inmates, including eight scheduled for lethal injections next month, jointly filed suit [complaint, PDF] against Governor Asa Hutchinson [official website] and Department of Correction Director Wendy Kelly [official website] on Monday to stop the executions. The suit is in response to an Arkansas Supreme Court [official website] decision earlier this month that stated there was no stay in place [JURIST report] preventing the eight executions ordered by Hutchinson to be carried out in April over a period of 10 days [AP report]. The attorneys for the inmates stated that the compressed schedule [ArkansasOnline report] is in violation of the inmates’ Eighth Amendment [text] rights and that the state prison policies denied effective representation of counsel.

The death penalty continues to be a point of contention across the United States. Last month the Mississippi house approved a bill [JURIST report] allowing firing squad executions. In January Ohio’s lethal injection protocol was deemed [JURIST report] unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. In November the legal status of the death penalty was upheld [JURIST report] by state referendum in Oklahoma, Nebraska and California. In September executions in Oklahoma were put on a two-year hiatus so Oklahoma can reevaluate its lethal injection procedures [JURIST report] following a botched execution and several drug mix-ups in the past two years. In December a report by the Death Penalty Information Center found that the use of capital punishment in the US is at a 20-year low [JURIST report].