A group of inmates on death row in Arkansas filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging a new state law allowing the use of nitrogen gas in executions.

That law, Act 302 of 2025, takes effect today.

A lawyer for the death row inmates said juries explicitly sentenced the inmates to execution by lethal injection, and the Legislature “cannot rewrite those verdicts to impose death by this very different and highly problematic method.”

We wrote about the proposal to use nitrogen gas for executions multiple times during the legislative session. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Jeff Wardlaw (R-Hermitage) and Sen. Blake Johnson (R-Corning) and co-sponsored by 64 other Republicans. It added nitrogen gas asphyxiation as a second method for carrying out executions in the state. Prior to Act 302,

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