The Arkansas Supreme Court [official website] upheld [opinion, PDF] a state law Thursday that allows for the type, manufacturers and sellers of drugs used for lethal injections to be kept confidential. This ruling would allow the execution of eight death row inmates if the stays on their execution dates can be lifted before one of the drugs in the three-drug protocol expires on June 30. A group of the death row inmates had argued that the drug secrecy laws had the potential to lead to cruel and unusual punishment and that the state had failed to keep their pledge to share that information.

Capital punishment [JURIST op-ed] remains a controversial issue in the US and worldwide. Last month the US Supreme Court [official website] upheld a stay [JURIST report] of execution for Alabama inmate Vernon Madison. A few days before that a Miami judge ruled [JURIST report] that Florida’s revamped death penalty law is unconstitutional because it does not require a unanimous agreement among jurors to approve executions. In April Virginia’s General Assembly voted [JURIST report] to keep secret the identities of suppliers of lethal injection drugs. In February the Eleventh Circuit rejected [JURIST report] a Georgia death row inmate’s legal challenge to the death penalty. In January Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood stated that he plans to ask lawmakers to approve the firing squad, electrocution or nitrogen gas as alternate methods of execution if lethal injection drugs become unavailable [JURIST report].