OUT OF TIME
THE US government has executed the first federal inmate in almost two decades.
Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, of Yukon, Oklahoma, died by lethal injection this morning at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
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It came just hours after the Supreme Court stepped in to clear the way for the execution overnight with a 5-4 vote.
Lee was a self-confessed white supremacist and convicted killer.
He was responsible for the 1996 Arkansas killings of gun dealer William Mueller, his wife Nancy, and her 8-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell.
However his last words were defiant - “I didn’t do it,” Lee said just moments before he was executed at 8.07am EDT.
He went on: “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I'm not a murderer... You're killing an innocent man.”
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His execution - the first of federal inmates in 17 years - was carried out after a series of legal volleys that ended when the Supreme Court taking a vote early Tuesday in a 5-4 ruling and allowed it to move forward.
It was the first execution carried out at the federal level since 2003 at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The executions have been pushed by the Trump administration.
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It followed protests from his victims’ families, who pleaded for the execution to be delayed.
Relatives say they are — and have said they want to be present during it to counter any contention that it was being done on their behalf.
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.
They demanded a delay until after the pandemic.
“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 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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Earlene Peterson, Nancy’s mother and Sarah’s grandmother, said in a statement last month: “As a supporter of President Trump, I pray that he will hear my message: the scheduled execution of Danny Lee for the murder of my daughter and granddaughter is not what I want and would bring my family more pain.”
The family’s attorney, Baker Kurrus said the federal government had put the family in “the untenable position of choosing between their right to witness Danny Lee’s execution and their own health and safety.”
However the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the injection, arguing the family had no right under federal law to attend the execution.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
THE MUELLER KILLINGS
Daniel Lewis Lee and his accomplice, Chevie Kehoe, were convicted of murder in aid of racketeering in 1999 for killing William Frederick Mueller, his wife Nancy Ann Mueller and his eight-year-old stepdaughter, Sarah Elizabeth Powell, while stealing guns from the Mueller family home.
It is understood Kehoe recruited Lee in 1995 for his white supremacist organization.
Two years later, they were arrested for the killings of the Mueller family.
At their 1999 trial, prosecutors said Kehoe and Lee stole guns, ammunition and $50,000 in cash from the Muellers as part of their plan to establish a whites-only nation.
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.
While Kehoe was sentenced to life in prison, prosecutors sought the death penalty for Lee.
He remained on death row since - and his punishment will be the first federal state execution to take place since 2003.
White supremacist who killed family, child rapists and mass murderer first to die when federal executions resume in July
MOST READ IN NEWS
Lee’s execution would be only the third carried out in the U.S. since March due to concerns about COVID-19.
Missouri executed an inmate in May, and Texas executed a man last week.
Lee’s attorneys have pressed their case that his death sentence is unfair, and cited evidence from his trial that Chevie Kehoe, the alleged ringleader, actually killed Sarah.
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