Amnesty International [advocacy website] (AI) released a statement [press release] on Thursday calling for Arkansas to halt the execution of eight death row prisoners. Arkansas has scheduled these execution to take place within short time spans of each other in order to beat the expiration of their drug of choice, midazolam. According to Erika Guevara Rosas [official profile], Americas Director at AI,

The close scheduling of these executions is unprecedented in modern US history. Just four months after the USA recorded its lowest execution total for a quarter of a century, Arkansas is preparing to buck this positive trend in a shameful race to beat a drug expiration date.

The groups says there are also major legal concerns attached to the prisoners on death row. In some of their cases their attorneys failed to provide a full depiction of their background, which may have deterred the jury from sentencing them to death, and in two particular cases the prisoners have been diagnosed with serious mental disabilities, which qualifies their executions as contrary to international law [AI backgrounder]. According to Rosas, death penalty cases has a list of problems, such as arbitrariness, inadequate legal representation, questionable prosecutorial tactics, and racial and economic discrimination.

The death penalty has been a pressing issue across the country. AI’s annual report [text, PDF], released earlier this month, revealed the USA to not be among the world’s top five executioners since 2006. In 2002, the US Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia [text], that the execution of the “mentally retarded” is excessive under the Eighth Amendment and the Constitution “places a substantive restriction on the State’s power to take the life” of such offender. In March the Mississippi house approved a bill [JURIST report] allowing firing squad executions. In January, a judge blocked [JURIST report] Ohio’s lethal injection protocol by deeming it unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. That same month, the US Supreme Court refused to consider [JURIST report] a challenge to Alabama’s death penalty system. In February the Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] in favor of a death row inmate seeking a new sentencing hearing based on racial bias caused by his ineffective counsel. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein [official profile] in March reaffirmed the UN’s long-standing position [JURIST report] against the death penalty and urged for member states to end use of it.