Capital Punishment

The death penalty was practiced in Arkansas even before the state was admitted to the Union in 1836, with the first legally sanctioned execution reportedly occurring at Arkansas Post in 1820. The Arkansas criminal code provides for the death penalty or life without parole upon conviction of capital murder or treason. Those convicted of rape were also subject to the death penalty until January 1, 1976, prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Coker v. Georgia that a death sentence for rape of an adult woman was disproportionate to the crime and violated the Eighth Amendment.

The first Arkansas penitentiary was authorized in 1838. Shortly thereafter, the state purchased ninety-two acres for $12 per acre and authorized $80,500 to construct the prison. It began operation in 1841 on the site of the current Arkansas State Capitol, a location that was then west of the Little Rock (Pulaski County) city limits. Convict labor was used to build it. There were relatively few beds because most of the convicts were leased to plantation owners, farmers, manufacturers, mining companies, and others who were responsible for their housing, food, healthcare, and security. The system not only paid for the cost of the penitentiary but also provided a surplus to the state treasury most years. However, over the years, a number of scandals arose over the treatment of convict labor. The most egregious was in 1880 when twenty percent of the convicts died while on contract. The practice finally ended in 1913, when the Arkansas General Assembly undertook a penitentiary reform effort. Another aspect of this reform was the centralization of executions at the State Penitentiary in Little Rock. Previously, prisoners were sentenced to death in the county where they were convicted. The law specified that electrocution was to be used to carry out the death sentence.

Isaac Parker, a two-term Republican congressman from Missouri, was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant as the federal judge for the Western District of Arkansas in 1875. The district had jurisdiction over the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). During his twenty-one-year tenure, Judge Parker tried 344 capital cases and sentenced 160 men to death by hanging. Only seventy-nine were actually hanged; the rest died in jail, had their sentences overturned on appeal, or were pardoned. Parker favored the abolition of the death penalty but felt he had to adhere strictly to the letter of the law.

The Arkansas General Assembly passed several laws affecting capital punishment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Act 24 of 1887 outlawed public executions, with senators noting during deliberations that “public executions brought to bear evil thoughts to some and others death by traveling many miles in the hot sun to witness an execution.” The law ordered that the gallows would be surrounded by an enclosure and that no more than twenty-five people would be allowed inside to witness the execution.

An exception was enacted in 1901 in response to public reaction to the conviction of John Wesley in a rape case in Arkadelphia (Clark County). A legislator, fearing that Wesley would be lynched if his hanging were private, shepherded Act 58 of 1901 through the General Assembly in just fourteen days, mandating that executions in rape cases be public. The Arkansas Democrat opined that Wesley’s execution, which was attended by 2,000 people, “would serve to impress the negroes with the enormity of such crimes as Wesley committed and perhaps deter some scoundrel from a like attempt.”

Four men, all Black, would be executed for rape over the next four years. Charles Anderson was the first, being hanged in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on July 26, 1901, with the Arkansas Gazette noting that “about 10,000 persons, men, women and children, white and colored, witnessed the execution.” Essex Pipkin (or Pippin) was hanged in Vanndale (Cross County) on October 11, 1901, and while news accounts did not include information on the number of spectators, “the hanging was in public, in accordance with the…law.” Hal Mahone’s November 7, 1902, execution in Van Buren (Crawford County) drew “a motley crowd variously estimated at from 2,000 to 5,000,” while Elisha Davis’s June 25, 1904, hanging in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) was “witnessed by about 5,000 persons, the most of whom were white people.”

The rape exception was rescinded the next year by Act 295 of 1905, which again made all executions private, while Act 61 of that legislature mandated that in change-of-venue cases in which someone was convicted of a capital crime, the execution would be conducted in the county where the crime took place instead of the county where the verdict was rendered. That issue became moot when Act 55 of 1913 ordered that all executions would be conducted at the Arkansas State Penitentiary. One last local execution (and the state’s last execution by hanging) took place after the passage of this law at the Paris (Logan County) jail on July 15, 1914; the condemned, John Arthur Tillman, had been convicted of killing his girlfriend, then putting her body in a well and filling the well with stones. The first man to die under the new law calling for electrocution to be used was Lee Sims from Prairie County.

The last prisoner to be electrocuted  in Arkansas was John Edward Swindler on June 13, 1990. Swindler was also the first execution since 1964. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled capital punishment as practiced in Georgia to be unconstitutional (Furman v. Georgia), a ruling that effectively suspended capital punishment laws throughout the United States. The Arkansas Gazette reported on June 30, 1972, that “Old Sparky,” the chair used for electrocutions in Arkansas, had been found stored in a closet at Tucker Intermediate Reformatory, saying, “The diesel engine used to produce the high voltage for electrocutions is stored in the prison garage.” The death penalty was reenacted in Arkansas in 1977 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976 affirmed the new procedures adopted by the State of Georgia.

In 1983, the Arkansas General Assembly adopted lethal injection as the method of execution. Anyone convicted before that law was enacted could choose electrocution or lethal injection. Charles Singleton was the last inmate with that choice. He chose lethal injection and died on January 6, 2004.

The Arkansas law provides that capital murder charges are to be tried in Circuit Court with mandatory review by the Arkansas Supreme Court. Conviction will result in one of two sentences: death by lethal injection or life in prison without possibility of parole. The trial is conducted in two phases—guilt/innocence and penalty. The jury must vote unanimously to impose the death penalty. Otherwise, the trial judge must impose life without parole.

In 1993, the criminal code was amended to create a mitigating circumstance for mental retardation in capital murder cases. The prosecutor must prove that a person with an intelligence quotient (IQ) of sixty-five or less knows the difference between right and wrong. This change in the law occurred in large part due to public reaction to the execution of Rickey Ray Rector on January 24, 1992. Apparently not understanding his situation, Rector left a piece of pecan pie from his last meal and remarked that he would eat it later, after the execution.

The governor has the power to grant clemency. Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, who declared a moratorium on executions when he took office in 1967, granted clemency to all fifteen men on death row on December 29, 1970. Clemency has been granted to a death row inmate only once since the death penalty was reestablished in 1977. Governor Mike Huckabee commuted the death sentence of Bobby Ray Fretwell on February 5, 1999. “I had rather face the anger of the people than the wrath of God,” Huckabee said of his decision.

According to Marlin Shipman, “The decade of the 1930s produced more state-sanctioned killing in Arkansas than any other decade during the twentieth century. Fifty-three men were electrocuted in the state’s electric chair.” Death row is located at the Varner SuperMax Prison south of Grady (Lincoln County).

The death penalty continues to draw support from both political parties and a majority of the citizens of Arkansas. Bill Clinton returned from campaigning in the New Hampshire Presidential Primary in 1992 in order to sign the warrant for Rickey Ray Rector’s execution. However, that support had begun to decline at the start of the twenty-first century as questions arose about fairness in regard to race or ethnicity and the possibility of executing an innocent person. In fact, the 2009 Arkansas General Assembly established a Legislative Task Force on Criminal Justice to study critical issues regarding major felonies including capital punishment.

On June 22, 2012, the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down Arkansas’s death penalty law because of a provision that said the Department of Correction could choose the drugs used in executions. The court ruled that the legislature had to set the quantity and type of drugs used. Due to a shortage of one of the drugs used in lethal injection, sodium thiopental, and legal challenges surrounding the execution methods, Arkansas had not executed an inmate since 2005. The Arkansas General Assembly passed a new death penalty law in 2013; it faced immediate legal challenges but was ruled constitutional by the Arkansas Supreme Court on March 19, 2015. In August 2015, Attorney General Leslie Rutledge announced that the state had purchased drugs to carry out the death penalty, and on September 9, 2015, Governor Asa Hutchinson set the execution dates for eight inmates. However, Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen soon thereafter issued an order temporarily halting the executions in the wake of a lawsuit seeking information on the drugs the state had obtained.

On June 23, 2016, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the state law keeping confidential information on lethal injection drugs. Governor Hutchinson later scheduled eight executions to occur within a ten-day period starting on April 17, 2017, on account of the imminent expiration of the state’s supply of midazolam, a drug that has been employed in executions. The compressed schedule drew criticism from across the nation, including from a group of former and current corrections officials; also at issue was the state’s intended use of midazolam as the initial sedative, given that the drug had failed to render condemned prisoners completely unconscious in previous executions. The means by which the state had acquired the drugs for execution also proved controversial—one supplier later filed suit against the state, insisting it had been misled as to the intended use of the drug, while the state’s supply of potassium chloride was “donated” anonymously in a parking lot. Various court rulings canceled the first three executions scheduled for April 2017. However, on April 20, the state executed Ledell Lee after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his last appeals, marking the first execution in Arkansas since 2005. On April 24, 2017, the state executed Jack Jones and Marcel Williams, the first time any state had carried out a double execution since 2010. Kenneth Williams was executed three days later.

On November 1, 2018, the Arkansas Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law that allowed the state prison director the authority to determine the competency of death-row inmates prior to execution. On June 1, 2020, U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker rejected a claim, filed on behalf of seventeen inmates, that use of midazolam violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. On August 16, 2022, the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed Baker’s ruling.

The following chart of those executions conducted at the county level is adapted, with permission, from a number of sources, including the the Winter 2020 issue of the Arkansas Family Historian (for most of the executions up through 1899), and the Arkansas Department of Corrections, for those executions carried out at the state level. Some events on this chart, indicated by an asterisk (*), are considered by scholars as more akin to lynchings than to executions.

For additional information:
“Arkansas.” Death Penalty Information Center. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state/arkansas (accessed May 13, 2022).

Atkins, Jerry. Hangin’ Times in Fort Smith: A History of Executions in Judge Parker’s Court. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2012.

Bayless, Garland E. “The Arkansas Penitentiary under Democratic Control, 1874–1896.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 34 (Autumn 1975): 195–213.

Brown, Robbie. “Arkansas Court Upends Death Penalty.” New York Times, June 23, 2012. Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/us/arkansas-justices-strike-down-death-penalty.html?_r=1 (accessed May 13, 2022).

Brummett, John. “The Politics of Death Row.” Arkansas Times, December 1990, pp. 50–54, 56.

Butler, Virgil. “The Murder of Deputy Sheriff Wheeler and the Trial of His Killer, Robert Rose.” Independence County Chronicle 1 (October 1959): 29–36.

Bynum, John. “Case Notes on State of Arkansas vs. Ronald Gene Simmons.” Pope County Historical Association Quarterly 28 (March 1994): 29–38.

“Capital Punishment Executions in Arkansas, 1820–1899.” Arkansas Family Historian 58 (Winter 2020): 4–11.

“The Case of Lee Barnes, the Last Man Hanged in Pope County.” Pope County Historical Journal 42 (December 2008): 16–25.

Christ, Mark K. “‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’: Nineteenth-Century Public Executions in Pulaski County.” Pulaski County Historical Review 71 (Summer 2023): 55–61.

Crawford, Sybil F. “Gone But Not Forgotten: But Almost.” Pulaski County Historical Review 42 (Summer 1994): 36–45. 

Crosley, Clyde. Unfolding Misconceptions: A Study of the Arkansas Prison System, 1836–1986. Arlington, TX: Liberal Arts Press, 1986.

Gould, Nita. Remembering Ella: A 1912 Murder and Mystery in the Arkansas Ozarks. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2018.

Grossman, Mark. Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Inc., 1998.

Haddigan, Michael. “Equal Opportunity.” Arkansas Times, April 9, 1999, pp. 12–15.

“The Hanging of Robert Lancaster.” Independence County Chronicle 8 (April 1972): 42–54.

Huddleston, Duane. “The Execution of David S. Lewis Batesville—April 29, 1859.” Independence County Chronicle 9 (July 1974): 9–12.

Jackson, Bruce. Killing Time: Life in the Arkansas Penitentiary. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.

“Joe Kemp Hanged in 1879 for Hulsey Murder in 1869.” Independence County Chronicle 9 (October 1967): 42–50.

Koon, David. “In Matters of Life and Death.” Arkansas Times, November 5, 2015, pp. 14–18, 20–22. Online at https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2015/11/04/in-matters-of-life-and-death (accessed March 19, 2024).

Leflar, Robert A. “Arkansas Criminal Law Reform Movement in 1934–36.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 5 (Spring 1946): 1–25.

Leus, Christian. “What Remains: Telling the Story of Irene Taylor’s Murder.” MA thesis, University of Mississippi, 2021. Online at https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2024/ (accessed March 19, 2024).

Leveritt, Mara. “Bribes and Lies on Death Row.” Arkansas Times, June 16, 1995, pp. 7–8, 10.

———.  “Mark and Me.” Arkansas Times, October 15, 1999, pp. 10–13.

Neal, Jas. P. “The First Legal Execution in Washington County.” Flashback 6 (January 1956): 32–35.

Palmer, Louis J., Jr. Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2001.

Parks-Spencer, Susan. “The John Selby Murder, the Event that Led to the First Legal Hanging of a Woman in Arkansas.” Flashback 73 (Fall 2023): 131–132.

Peacock, Leslie Newell. “Too Sane to Live or Too Sick to Die?” Arkansas Times, April 17, 1998, pp. 11–13.

Ringer, Andrea. “Arkansas and the Death Penalty: Responses to Governor Winthrop Rockefeller’s Commutation of Fifteen Death Sentences in 1970.” MA thesis, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2012.

———. “‘Purely Personal and Philosophical’: Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller’s Death Sentence Commutations.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 74 (Summer 2015): 130–146.

Rosenberg, Jacob. “‘Synthetic Civility’: Why Arkansas Plans to Kill Eight Men in 11 Days.” Arkansas Times, April 6, 2017, pp. 14–19. Online at http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/why-arkansas-plans-to-kill-eight-men-in-11-days/Content?oid=5989357 (accessed May 13, 2022).

Shipman, Marlin. “Arkansas Men and Media Celebrities: Arkansas Newspaper Coverage of Condemned Delta Defendants in the 1930s.” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 31 (August 2000): 110–124.

Thrasher, Christopher, and Guy Lancaster. “Sympathy for Devils: Race, Insanity, and Contention in Garland County’s Two Local Executions.” The Record 2022: 4.1–4.30.

Titsworth, Elizabeth. “The Last Hanging in Arkansas.” Wagon Wheels 12 (Spring 1992): 23–37.

Trotti, Michael Ayers. The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion and Punishment in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Urwin, Cathy Kunzinger. Agenda for Reform: Winthrop Rockefeller as Governor of Arkansas, 1967–1971. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991.

Williams, John. “A Case against Death.” Arkansas Times, June 5, 2008, pp. 12–15. Online at https://arktimes.com/general/top-stories/2008/06/05/a-case-against-death (accessed October 7, 2024).

Wyatt, Ralph. “The Murder of Sheriff Jeff D. Morgan; Trial and Execution of his Killer.” Independence County Chronicle 2 (April 1961): 14–24.

David L. Rickard
Little Rock, Arkansas

Mark K. Christ
Central Arkansas Library System