Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is preparing for the state’s first execution in nearly six decades. Kobach wants a change in state law that would require death warrants, the formal judicial documents authorizing officials to kill a prisoner, to be issued within 30 days of a death row prisoner exhausting their appeals, the Kansas City Star reports. His proposal would take the responsibility for issuing death warrants away from the Kansas Supreme Court and place it with district judges. Kansas should also allow executions by hypoxia, Kobach said. The controversial execution method deprives a person of oxygen and was used in the U.S. for the first time last month when Alabama executed a man using nitrogen gas. Kobach voiced concern that existing law would prevent an execution from taking place because it does not clearly state how an execution is ordered and because lethal injection drugs are difficult to obtain. "We are lying to the people of Kansas if we say that we have the death penalty but we actually can’t carry out an execution,” Kobach said.
The changes would ensure family members of victims don’t have to wait any longer than necessary to see justice served, Kobach said. Critics say the bill allows executions in an inhumane manner and speeds up the execution process in a way that risks limiting a defendant’s ability to exhaust federal and state appeals. Micah Kubic of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas called the proposed legislation extreme. “We are truly disturbed by AG Kobach’s desire to not only boost the power of the state to kill in a novel, potentially painful way – but to also remove the safeguards against this most brutal kind of government overreach. Looking across the country, states that use the death penalty actively are far from safer because of it,” Kubic said. Others say the bill contains vague language open to interpretation that would lead to litigation. Nine people are currently on death row in Kansas. None has exhausted appeals.
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