Arkansas executes a coon

[Democrats]

STAR CITY, Ark. — James Hawkins, the affable local coroner, has
long performed a grim duty on execution nights: He pronounces
the deaths of the condemned prisoners. He has done it more than
two dozen times.

Mr. Hawkins declared another man dead on Thursday night, when
Arkansas executed its fourth prisoner in seven days. Seventeen
years after pronouncing the death of a murder victim and family
friend, Cecil Boren, Mr. Hawkins did the same for Mr. Boren’s
killer, Kenneth D. Williams.

“It’s a satisfying moment,” Mr. Hawkins said in an interview at
a funeral home in this largely rural patch of southeast
Arkansas, where prisons and produce are about all that power the
local economy. “What I’ve heard nonstop in this community — this
entire community — is: ‘This is the one we’re waiting on.’”

Mr. Williams was executed at 11:05 p.m. after the United States
Supreme Court rejected an appeal from his lawyers, who sought to
block the execution on the grounds that their client was
intellectually disabled and ineligible for the death penalty.
Prison officials said that he requested holy communion as his
last meal.

The daughter of Michael Greenwood, the man killed during the
pursuit in Missouri, urged Gov. Asa Hutchinson to stop the
execution. “We are in no way asking you to ignore the pain felt
by the victims of Mr. Williams’s other crimes,” Kayla Greenwood
wrote in a letter this week. “We know what they are going
through, but ours is a pain that we have decided not to try and
cure by seeking an execution.”

Mr. Hutchinson, who set the state’s execution schedule, did not
offer a reprieve.

At Carla’s Cafe, a lunch spot in Star City, the county seat,
that was just fine. On Wednesday afternoon, when grilled pork
chop was a lunch special, residents expressed little concern for
Mr. Williams, whose lawyers argue he is intellectually disabled.

“When they apprehended him in Missouri, they should have shot
him down and killed that sucker,” Wayne Harmon, 66, said.

Polling suggests that more than 70 percent of the state’s
residents support the death penalty, but, because of drug supply
issues, it is not clear when Arkansas will be able to put anyone
to death again.

In this area, people welcomed the fact that Mr. Williams died
just before the expected onset of an informal moratorium.

Emotions here are rarely so vivid for executions at Cummins,
but, Mr. Hawkins noted, “When it hits your home, it’s a little
different.”

Mr. Boren’s widow declined to be interviewed. Her family opposed
clemency for Mr. Williams.

Vickie Williams, Ms. Hurd’s mother and no relation to Mr.
Williams, said her daughter had ambitions of being a
neonatologist as a biology and premedical student at the
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where she was known as
Nicky. Ms. Williams said she did not plan to attend the
execution, but she supported it.

“He did not receive the death penalty for killing Nicky,” she
wrote in an email. “If proper justice was served, others may not
have lost their lives. The justice system is very confusing.
Everyone has rights except for the families of victims.”

Rodney Kennedy, a local resident, said Mr. Williams cut across
his parents’ 1,500-acre property after he fled from Cummins.

“I think they’re doing the right thing executing him,” Mr.
Kennedy said. “He could always escape again and kill again.”

After the execution, Mr. Boren’s daughter, Jodie Efird, said her
mother’s “peace will come later.”

“Her peace will come every time we’re driving down this road,”
she said. “He’s not here anymore.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/us/in-area-near-arkansas-
prison-an-execution-is-the-one-were-waiting-on.html?_r=0