LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A filing in Pulaski County Circuit Court on Tuesday shows 10 inmates on Arkansas’ Death Row are suing to block the state’s use of nitrogen gas for executions.
The lawsuit questions the constitutionality of the execution method. In each of the 10 cases, jurors, having found the person guilty of capital murder, were given the choice of life without parole or death by lethal injection.
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Those on death row were given a sentence of death by lethal injection. The filing includes trial transcripts showing the language used during the court hearings.
Since the inmates were not assigned death by nitrogen hypoxia, the lawsuit argues, it is illegal to execute them in this manner.
Arkansas has not executed an inmate since 2017, when four were executed over 11 days. Chemicals needed for lethal injection are difficult to get due to pharmaceutical companies being reluctant to sell them for that purpose.
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The legislature passed, and Gov. Sanders signed into law, Act 302 of 2025, to permit the use of nitrogen hypoxia as a form of execution by updating existing law and changing the term “death by lethal injection” in the law to “death.”
The lawsuit continues that Act 302 gives the Arkansas Department of Corrections complete discretion in which form of execution to choose, lethal injection or nitrogen, “and provides even less guidance than the version of the statute narrowly upheld by the Arkansas Supreme Court.”
Act 302 also includes language that if a method of execution is found unconstitutional, the death penalty remains in effect.
Opponents of nitrogen gas executions claim it is an unfairly cruel manner of execution, upheld by a recent scientific study.
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An attorney for several of the inmates summed up the issue as a constitutional issue.
“This law delegates unprecedented and unchecked authority to unelected executive branch officials in the Division of Correction, who are now empowered to gas our clients to death despite the fact that all of them were sentenced under a law that only allowed for execution by lethal injection,” Heather Fraley said. “The new law provides the Division of Correction no guidance or standards by which to select the method or manner of these executions, which violates Arkansas’s separation of powers.”
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