At the least, Gov. Asa Hutchinson made a public-relations mistake.
Regardless of how a federal judge may have ruled Friday after this writing on whether to halt seven executions in 11 days, it remained that Hutchinson had caused Arkansas to appear to the world--including to business prospects--a bloodthirsty place.
He made the state seem brutally determined to carry out executions at record speed. He chose to schedule apace all the inmate-killing available to the state, and to compress the schedule to get the killing done before the expiration date on a drug supply.
On Thursday, he chatted with maybe 20 state-based media people--but not any of the national and international ones hovering around--to try to explain himself.
And he did not do a very good job, perhaps because he couldn't.
He offered only one solid line of context, which is that the matter fell in his lap. Which is called being governor.
Arkansas has been out of the execution business since 2005 because of legal, statutory and drug issues. All of that happened to get resolved this year, leaving Hutchinson with eight execution dates to set under the law, as well as under a new statute requiring the use of a drug that Arkansas had on its shelf, but with an end-of-April expiration date.
Hutchinson acknowledged that he had a few options. One would have been to set three executions in a single night, which was the preferred grotesqueness on two occasions of former Gov. Mike Huckabee. But he said he wasn't comfortable with that.
Another would have been to spread the executions over a period of months--four, five or six, perhaps. Hutchinson made two faulty arguments against that option.
One was that he didn't want to go to the families of the victims of those murders and tell them he was delaying the executions for months merely out of a public-relations concern for the state's image.
But it would have been reasonable enough to go to those families, assure them of support for the execution of their loved ones' assailants and explain that so many cases had piled up over 12 years that a sense of decorum required him to spread the dates--though only through the end of summer or into early fall.
The other faulty argument was that the "European media," which Hutchinson seemed to view as the chief source of his criticism, though many in the American media haven't been kind, would have made as much of multiple executions scheduled over months as is being made of the scheduled compression into days.
As a longtime newspaper veteran, I can assure the governor that the news hook is the record pace of executions in 11 days to beat a drug expiration date, and that the same number of executions spaced over five or six months would not have been nearly as big a story.
Why did the governor have a personal aversion to three executions in one night but none to eight in 11?
The governor said it was simply a personal sense. Fine. But the world is entitled to the same sense about seven or eight executions in 11 days merely to get a drug used up.
Is that fair--to say Hutchinson scheduled the executions only to beat the drug-expiration deadline?
He got asked about that this way: If the state had possessed plenty of the drug available into the future, would he have set the executions by this same schedule? He basically said that was hypothetical and declined to answer.
Hutchinson seemed altogether off his game.
For example: Asked to square his actions with the commutation of all death-row sentences by a Republican governor for whom he has expressed great admiration--Winthrop Rockefeller, nearly a half-century ago--Hutchinson pointed out that WR only commuted the sentences as he was leaving office.
Was he saying Rockefeller had the nerve to act only when the political complications were removed? Was he saying he didn't have that luxury because his political complications aren't removed, considering that he will seek another term? Was he admitting his own action was political?
Or was the governor just not having a good day?
I got the idea--but it's just me--that he wouldn't mind terribly if the federal courts took him off the hook.
One factor not a problem for Hutchinson is in-state politics. The death penalty is popular in Arkansas. Voters don't so much care how many we kill and how quickly, or whether a sedative eases the pain.
Hutchinson told us Thursday that other states had executed hundreds over the dozen years during which Arkansas had executed none, and that those states hadn't suffered damage to reputation or economic development.
But none did this much killing so quickly only to beat a drug-expiration deadline.
Again, governor, that's the hook for the story. And your error.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/16/2017