A 46-year-old inmate died Tuesday at a Batesville hospital, an Arkansas Department of Correction spokesman said.
Pamela Allen, a prison inmate since 2010 who was assigned to the McPherson Unit in Newport, died at 5:18 a.m. Tuesday at the White River Medical Center in Batesville, spokesman Cathy Frye said.
Allen was serving a 13-year sentence out of Monroe County for aggravated robbery.
Also Tuesday, Frye released the name of East Arkansas Regional Unit inmate Tommy Lemons, 48, who died at 11:27 a.m. on Feb. 6 at the Forrest City Medical Center. Prison officials were unable to locate Lemons' next of kin and therefore delayed releasing his name, Frye said.
Lemons was serving a 14-year sentence for a Pulaski County robbery conviction.
Another inmate, Sammy Smith, 71, died at 6:24 p.m. Feb. 10 at Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock. He had been serving a 40-year sentence at the Ouachita River Unit in Malvern on a first-degree murder charge in the 1999 shooting death of David Crabtree in a Dumas motel room.
Frye said none of the deaths will be investigated by the Arkansas State Police because the inmates died of natural causes.
In January, prison officials stopped the practice of releasing a specific cause of death for inmates. Instead, each death is classified as natural causes, unless there are special circumstances that would lead to a state police investigation.
Jim DePriest, the department's chief legal counsel, said in January that the causes of inmates' deaths are "generally exempt" from disclosure according to state law, A.C.A. 12-27-113.
There have been 12 Arkansas prison deaths since Jan. 1; there were 56 deaths in 2014.
State Desk on 02/22/2015