Desperate Arkansas death row prisoner pleads to be state’s first execution since 2017

A death row prisoner in Arkansas is begging the state to kill him, but his death wish is being stalled by a lawsuit from 10 other inmates trying to stop a highly controversial execution method.

Scotty Gardner, 60, has been on death row since his speedy conviction in 2018 for strangling his girlfriend to death with a curling iron cord and stealing her valuables to go gambling at a nearby casino.

Before his death sentence, Gardner was previously convicted of attempted murder and served time for repeatedly shooting his ex-wife while she was six months pregnant in 1990.

Now, Gardner is begging for the sweet release of death so he can finally leave “his cave” — a shoddy cell plagued with mold, poor plumbing, and “a sink and drain in the floor that bugs crawl in and out constantly,” he wrote in an email to USA Today.

The killer previously penned a letter to the Arkansas State Supreme Court in 2020 saying he’d accept any means of execution, including the firing squad or electric chair. He doubled down in a 2025 filing, writing, “set a date and let’s do it.”

Other prisoners waiting on death row, however, aren’t nearly as eager to meet their maker as Gardner and have thus complicated his request.

Ten inmates filed a lawsuit against Arkansas for its use of nitrogen hypoxia as a means of execution after its new authorization went into effect on Aug. 5.

“Arkansas juries explicitly sentenced our clients to execution by lethal injection – not gas – and the General Assembly cannot rewrite those verdicts to impose death by this very different and highly problematic method,” Heather Fraley, an attorney for several of the plaintiffs, said in a press release announcing the filing.

Death by nitrogen hypoxia consists of pumping the convicts with pure nitrogen gas, forcing them to suffocate, which Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi already permit to make up for the decreasing availability of the drugs needed for lethal injection, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

It’s a largely untested means of execution that is used in the Sarco suicide pods, which can only be legally used in a handful of countries outside of the US.

It’s unclear how the state would administer a nitrogen hypoxia death.

No one has been executed in Arkansas since 2017, and even then, it was the first time they’d followed through on the controversial death sentence in a dozen years.

In 2017, then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson ordered eight executions to be carried out in just 11 days before its supply of lethal injection drugs expired.

Four were quickly stayed and two were successfully carried out. The remaining two were allegedly botched, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Now, many death row inmates in Arkansas are just left to die in their cells before ever reaching their fate.

Bruce Ward, the state’s longest-serving death row prisoner, died of natural causes at the age of 68 on April 2. He was originally included in the 2017 lineup, but his execution was stayed. He sat on death row for a staggering 35 years.

In early June, Latavious Johnson died of unspecified causes at 43 years old. He was originally sentenced for killing his father in 2000 and, later, fatally shanking a correctional officer in 2012.