Law Enforcement

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Entry Category: Law Enforcement - Starting with E

Edmunds, Howard (Execution of)

Howard Edmunds was hanged on December 9, 1881, in Warren (Bradley County) for the murder of his young sister-in-law with whom he had had an affair and impregnated. Edmunds, age twenty-six, was born in Fairfield County, South Carolina, and moved to Arkansas around 1877, settling in Monticello (Drew County) where he soon married his cousin, widow Minnie Stitt, the daughter of planter James R. Watson. Stitt’s sister (and also Edmunds’s cousin), sixteen-year-old Sallie Watson, was a frequent visitor to their home, and she and Edmunds began an affair that resulted in her becoming pregnant. In late June 1881, Howard and Minnie Edmunds and several friends went on a fishing trip during which Edmunds “was abstracted and absent minded to a …

Ellison, Eugene (Killing of)

The 2010 “police-involved shooting” death of Eugene Ellison in his own apartment in Little Rock (Pulaski County) became a local touchstone for a growing movement for police reform, one that picked up steam with the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2013. The killing resulted in the largest police shooting victims’ compensation in the history of Arkansas at the time. On December 9, 2010, across the street from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, off-duty Little Rock Police Department (LRPD) officer Donna Lesher fatally shot unarmed sixty-seven-year-old Eugene Ellison, an African-American man, during her evening patrol as a security guard. Lesher had confronted Ellison because of his open front door and asked Ellison if he was okay. Ellison, who …

Executions of April 2017

The State of Arkansas announced plans to carry out a total of eight executions over a eleven-day period in April 2017. Originally planned as four double executions scheduled for April 17, 20, 24, and 27, ultimately only four executions were carried out, including a double execution. On February 27, 2017, Governor Asa Hutchinson announced that eight men would be executed in April. The men scheduled to die were Don Davis and Bruce Earl Ward, scheduled to be executed on April 17; Ledell Lee and Stacey Johnson on April 20; Marcell Williams and Jack Jones Jr. on April 24; and Jason McGehee and Kenneth Williams on April 27. The execution protocol for the state utilized a three-drug cocktail consisting of Midazolam, …