US judge delays first federal execution in 17 years

Washington (AFP) – A US judge ordered a delay on Monday of the first federal execution in the United States in 17 years — the death by lethal injection of a former white supremacist scheduled to be carried out later in the day.

Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, of Yukon, Oklahoma, and another man were convicted of murdering a family of three in 1996 during a robbery intended to help fund the founding of an “Aryan Peoples Republic.”

Lee was scheduled to be executed at 4:00 pm (2000 GMT) at Terre Haute prison in the midwestern state of Indiana, the first of three federal inmates whose executions were to take place this week.

But US District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the executions halted to allow for legal challenges to the lethal injection that was to be used.

Chutkan said the use of a single drug, pentobarbital, to carry out the executions could cause “extreme pain and needless suffering” and may violate a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

“The public is not served by short-circuiting legitimate judicial process,” the judge said.

The Justice Department immediately appealed the judge’s order to a higher court and the Supreme Court may eventually have the final say.

Lee would be the first federal inmate to be executed in the United States since 2003 and the first since President Donald Trump announced plans to resume federal executions.

There have been just three federal executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1988.

Lee and another man, Chevie Kehoe, were convicted in Arkansas in 1999 of the 1996 murders of William Mueller, a gun dealer, his wife, Nancy, and her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell.

According to prosecutors, the pair robbed Mueller to steal guns that they planned to sell to finance the founding of a white supremacist “Aryan Peoples Republic” in the Pacific Northwest.

Lee, who has since renounced his white supremacist beliefs according to his lawyers, was sentenced to death while Kehoe received three life sentences without the possibility of parole.

– ‘Untenable position’ –

Earlene Peterson, 81, whose daughter and granddaughter were killed, has campaigned against Lee’s death sentence, saying she wants him to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“It’s an easy way out,” Peterson told The New York Times. “He should have to live through this. Like I did.”

Peterson and relatives of other victims also filed a lawsuit seeking to delay the execution, arguing that it was dangerous for them to travel to Terre Haute to witness Lee’s execution because of the coronavirus pandemic.

An appeals court dismissed the suit on Sunday, but Baker Kurrus, a lawyer for the families, said he would take appeal to the Supreme Court.

“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,” Kurrus said.

The Bureau of Prisons said Sunday that a member of the Terre Haute prison staff had tested positive for COVID-19.

“There’s no reason for anybody to be carrying out executions right now because of the pandemic,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

More than 1,000 US religious leaders urged Trump last week to abandon plans to resume federal executions and Dunham accused the president of “political use of the death penalty.”

Trump, who faces a tough re-election battle in November, has called for stepped up use of capital punishment, especially for killers of police officers and drug traffickers.

Only a handful of US states, mainly in the conservative South, still actively carry out executions. In 2019, 22 people were put to death.

Most crimes are tried under state laws, but federal courts handle some of the most serious crimes — terror attacks, hate crimes and the like — as well as those committed on military bases and Indian reservations.

Among the most notable recent federal executions was that of Timothy McVeigh, who was put to death by lethal injection in 2001 for the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma that killed 168 people.