DEATH DELAYED
A JUDGE has ordered a delay in the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee, who was set to be the first federal execution in 17 years on Monday afternoon.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan said there are still legal issues to resolve regarding federal executions and that “the public is not served by short-circuiting legitimate judicial process.”
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, was set to be at the US Penitentiary in , at 4pm on Monday.
The executions have been pushed by the Trump administration.
After Chutkan's decision on Monday, the administration immediately appealed to a higher court, asking that the executions move forward.
Lee was convicted in of the 1996 killings of gun dealer William Mueller, his wife, Nancy, and her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell.
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Relatives say they are adamantly opposed to his execution — and have said they want to be present during it to counter any contention that it was being done on their behalf.
“For us, it is a matter of being there and saying, 'This is not being done in our name; we do not want this,’” Monica Veillette, a relative, said.
The relatives would be traveling thousands of miles and witnessing the execution in a small room where the social distancing recommended to prevent spread is virtually impossible.
The federal prison system has struggled in recent months to contain the exploding number of COVID cases behind bars — and there are currently four confirmed infections among inmates at the Terre Haute prison, and one inmate there has died.
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“The federal government has put this family in the untenable position of choosing between their right to witness Danny Lee’s execution and their own health and safety,” Baker Kurrus, the family's attorney, said on Sunday.
told The Associated Press last week that it's his duty to carry out sentences imposed by the court system — including the death penalty.
He said the sentences bring a sense of closure to the victims and those in the communities where the happened.
Barr said he believes the Bureau of Prisons could “carry out these executions without being at risk" from coronavirus.
The agency has put a number of additional measures in place, including temperature checks and requiring execution witnesses to wear masks.
On Sunday, the Justice Department said that a staff member involved in preparing for Lee's execution had tested positive for coronavirus, but said he had not been in the execution chamber and had not come into contact with anyone on the specialized team sent to the prison to handle the execution.
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The victim’s family has asked the Justice Department and not to move forward with the execution and have long asked that he be given a life sentence instead.
Three men were scheduled to be executed in the this week after Barr announced last year that federal executions would resume after 17 years.
The decision ended an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the issue receded from the public domain.
A fourth man was scheduled to be executed in August.
Executions on the federal level have been rare and the US government has put to death only three defendants since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988.
The most recent person to die was in 2003, when Louis Jones was executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young female soldier.
Though there hasn’t been a federal execution since 2003, the Justice Department has continued to approve death penalty prosecutions and federal courts have sentenced defendants to death.
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Lee is a self-proclaimed white supremacist from , who has lost one eye in a fight.
The deaths of his three victims in order to steal a large collection of guns, ammunition, and money.
White supremacist who killed family, child rapists and mass murderer first to die when federal executions resume in July
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In May 1999, a jury in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas found Lee guilty of numerous offenses, including three counts of murder in aid of racketeering and he was sentenced to death.
He has remained on death row since - and his punishment will be the first federal state execution to take place since 2003.
Lee will be executed by lethal injection at 4pm local time on Monday, July 13.
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