Attorneys for Williams had noted that he shared medical issues with Jones and said corrections staff struggled to insert a central line into Jones’s neck. The attorneys said that corrections officials did not wait five minutes, as required by the execution policy, after the injection began to check and make sure Jones was unconscious after the sedative was administered. They also alleged that Jones was still “moving his lips and gulping for air” after five minutes had elapsed.

From the beginning, Ledell proclaimed his innocence and wrote to everyone he could think of, beseeching lawyers to fight for him. His journey through the legal system consisted of an unbroken chain of drunk, conflicted, and grossly incompetent attorneys. No one who represented Ledell ever looked at the chasm between the state’s theory of guilt and the proof presented at trial. For instance, the crime scene was drenched in blood, but the state witnesses who put Ledell at the scene said he didn’t have any blood on him. None of the limited forensic evidence tested, like fingerprint analysis, at the time matched him. Ledell has been asking for DNA testing for decades.

Until last week, when our team joined his defense and began to frantically investigate the case, no defense lawyer had ever hired a psychologist to test Ledell’s intellectual disability. And no court had ever been troubled by the one pertinent claim his former counsel had raised: that a member of the prosecution team was having an affair with the trial judge at the time of Ledell’s trial.

As a death penalty lawyer who handles death penalty cases exclusively, I am all too familiar with the story of poor lawyering and court failures. That said, the facts of Ledell’s case stand out and are an indictment of the system that put him to death. Serious questions of guilt, conflicts of interest by defense counsel, a deeply biased judge, and never presented evidence of intellectual disability: Any one of these bases should be enough to pause an execution. It is profoundly disturbing that even taken together, they weren’t enough to move the courts or the governor to spare his life.

Gov. Hutchinson bears heavy blame for the wrongful killing of Ledell Lee. Hutchinson arbitrarily set eight dates for execution — originally as four double executions — based on the amount of midazolam, a lethal injection drug, Arkansas had on hand. Worse still, he scheduled them within an incredibly short period, so he could beat the drug’s expiration date of April 30.