The Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday unanimously approved a bill that would amend the state’s death-penalty statute, which was ruled unconstitutional by the Arkansas Supreme Court last summer.

“This is a bill that simply answers the concerns of the Supreme Court about the chemicals and method of execution,” the bill’s sponsor Sen. Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, told the committee. “We felt like we properly addressed those concerns and tried to clear them up so we can move forward.”

Under Senate Bill 237, prisoners would first be injected with a benzodiazepine, an anti-anxiety drug, before receiving “a barbiturate in an amount sufficient to cause death.”

The bill also states that the director of the Department of Correction should “develop logistical procedures” to ensure that the day of execution goes smoothly.

The Supreme Court in June struck down Act 1296 of 2009, the Method of Execution Act, saying that the Legislature “abdicated its responsibility and passed to the executive branch, in this case the [Correction Department], unfettered discretion to determine all protocol and procedures, most notably the chemicals to be used, for state execution.”

The court ruled that there was an issue of separation of powers in the statute and that it was the duty of the Legislature to tell the department how to carry out the executions.

But the court did not elab-orate on what must be done to ensure the statute could stand up to constitutional muster.

“As you know, the Supreme Court said that they specifically declined to give us any guidance on what would make the law constitutional, so they declared our law unconstitutional, but wouldn’t tell us what we needed to do to fix it. So we’ll find out what’s left to fix probably in litigation, but we have attempted to anticipate any concerns that could be raised,” Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel told the committee.

The vote comes exactly a week after the committee heard more than an hour of discussion on the death penalty, which included input from prosecutors, university professors, an exonerated man who had been sentenced to death and family members of murder victims.

That meeting was in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the death penalty, chairman Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, R-Little Rock, told the committee.

No legislation has been filed that would eliminate the death penalty in the state, but Gov. Mike Beebe has said he would sign such a bill if it reached his desk.

The last person executed by the state was Eric Nance, 45, on Nov. 28, 2005.

McDaniel told the committee that of the 37 men on death row, eight have exhausted their appeals and are awaiting execution.

“If we have a constitutionally sound method of execution that the courts won’t stop, then yes, I will send a letter to the governor asking that he sign death warrants,” McDaniel told reporters later.

The attorney general said that he has also worked with the Department of Correction to clear up the issue of specifying what type of drug should be used in an execution.

“One of the things the bill does is to leave open the category of barbiturates without identifying a specific lethalinjection agent,” McDaniel said after the meeting. “The Department of Correction assures me that there are available agents on the market with FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval withoutany DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] encumbrances and that if the law is passed we will have access to the necessary chemicals in order to carry out the executions that are awaiting completion.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/07/2013