Daniel Lewis Lee in 1997. He was executed after being convicted of the 1996 killings of an Arkansas gun dealer, his wife and her 8-year-old daughter.
Photo: Dan Pierce/Associated PressThe Trump administration on Tuesday morning carried out the first federal execution since 2003, after a divided Supreme Court rejected inmate claims that using pentobarbital for lethal injections would be unconstitutional.
In an unsigned opinion, the court’s five-member conservative majority sought to end the fusillade of litigation four condemned men and their allies filed since Attorney General William Barr announced plans a year ago to reactivate the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Ind.
Daniel Lewis Lee was pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m. EDT after federal prisons officials injected him with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. Two other convicted murderers are also set to be put to death this week, and another is scheduled for execution in August.
Mr. Lee, 47, had been scheduled to die Monday afternoon for the 1996 killings of an Arkansas gun dealer, his wife and her 8-year-old daughter.
But Monday morning, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the District of Columbia blocked the government from proceeding so that the inmates could present arguments that pentobarbital, the drug chosen for lethal injection, could cause “extreme pain and needless suffering during their executions.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined the government’s immediate request to reinstate the executions, but set an expedited schedule to hear the case. The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court, sending the justices into a late-night review of the death-penalty claims days after completing their annual term.
Related Reading
- Last-Minute Push Aims to Block First Federal Death Penalty Killing Since 2003 July 13, 2020
- Federal Government Set to Resume Executions July 25, 2019
- Death Penalty Continues to Wane in the U.S. July 23, 2019
The conservative justices would have none of it. The court’s role was to “fairly and expeditiously” resolve challenges to lawful sentences, the court said, leaving the wisdom of capital punishment to the legislative process. The court’s four liberal justices dissented, with two of them suggesting the death penalty itself couldn’t be applied in accord with the Constitution.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh constituted the majority.
“In keeping with that responsibility, we vacate the District Court’s preliminary injunction so that the plaintiffs’ executions may proceed as planned,” the court said.
An undated image from the Kansas Department of Corrections shows death row inmate Wesley Ira Purkey.
Photo: -/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Dustin Lee Honken was led by U.S. Marshals into the Federal Courthouse in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, prior to his sentencing in 2005.
Photo: Cliff Jette/Associated Press
This undated booking photo released by the Wyandotte County Sheriff's Office in Kansas City, Kansas, shows death row inmate Keith Dwayne Nelson.
Photo: -/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesAt 7:46 a.m., Mr. Lee was seen strapped to a gurney wearing a brown shirt with an IV in his left arm, according to media accounts. A spiritual adviser was present. Asked if he wanted to make a final statement, he said, “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer.”
“You’re killing an innocent man,” he said.
Mr. Lee was convicted in 1999 of crimes including three counts of murder in aid of racketeering, a federal crime. Prosecutors said he broke into the family’s home in rural Arkansas with another man, Chevie Kehoe. Together they suffocated the family before throwing their bodies in a bayou. Prosecutors said the men were on a quest to establish a whites-only republic in the Pacific Northwest using guns and money stolen from the victims.
The other prisoners set to die this week are Wesley Ira Purkey, convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl then burning and dismembering her body, and Dustin Lee Honken, convicted of fatally shooting five people, including two children. A fourth man, Keith Dwayne Nelson, who was convicted of kidnapping and raping a 10-year-old girl before killing her, is scheduled to be executed Aug. 28. Mr. Kehoe was sentenced to life in prison.
In separate orders issued without opinions or noted dissent, the court also rejected Mr. Lee’s claim that he had ineffective counsel, and a suit from Earlene Peterson, the 81-year-old mother of one of Mr. Lee’s victims. She had contended she and others were forced to choose between their health and attending the execution because the federal Bureau of Prisons hadn’t taken adequate precautions to protect her and other execution witnesses during the coronavirus pandemic.
Ms. Peterson, along with her daughter and granddaughter, had urged President Trump to commute Mr. Lee’s sentence to life imprisonment, but received no response.
The challenge to pentobarbital was unworthy of consideration, the court said, noting that it had never struck down an execution method for violating the Eighth Amendment protection from “cruel and unusual punishments.” States had for decades sought “new methods, such as lethal injection, thought to be less painful and more humane than traditional methods, like hanging, that have been uniformly regarded as constitutional for centuries,” the court said.
The federal government followed that trend by selecting single-dose pentobarbital, which “has become a mainstay of state executions,” the court said. The barbiturate “has been repeatedly invoked by prisoners as a less painful and risky alternative to the lethal injection protocols of other jurisdictions,” the court said, and “has been used to carry out over 100 executions, without incident.”
The inmates had cited experts who suggest that “pentobarbital causes prisoners to experience ‘flash pulmonary edema,’ a form of respiratory distress that temporarily produces the sensation of drowning or asphyxiation,” the majority opinion noted. But the government disputed those claims, and the eve of execution simply was too late to raise them, the high court concluded.
Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, said the majority was sidestepping necessary review to aid the government’s rush to the execution chamber. She said the majority often had gone out of its way to grant Trump administration requests to set aside lower-court orders blocking challenged policies.
“The dangers of that practice are particularly severe here, where the grant of the Government’s emergency application inflicts the most irreparable of harms,” she wrote. “The Court forever deprives respondents of their ability to press a constitutional challenge to their lethal injections, and prevents lower courts from reviewing that challenge.”
In a separate dissent, also joined by Justice Ginsburg, Justice Stephen Breyer raised broader questions about capital punishment that he said put its constitutionality in doubt.
“The death penalty is often imposed arbitrarily,” he wrote. For instance, “Mr. Lee’s co-defendant in his capital case was sentenced to life imprisonment despite committing the same crime.”
An earlier challenge to the lethal injection protocol derailed Mr. Barr’s plans to begin executions last December, but in April the D.C. Circuit, by a 2-1 vote, rejected inmate arguments that the single-drug lethal injection protocol violated the federal Death Penalty Act, which requires that federal executions be conducted in the manner prescribed by the state where the prisoner was convicted, or an alternate state if the state of conviction has no death penalty. The Supreme Court declined to review that decision.
The Trump administration has made resumption of federal executions a priority, putting it at odds with national trends that have seen both use of and public support for capital punishment decline. Mr. Trump’s expected Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has said he would seek to repeal the federal death penalty and encourage states to follow suit.
Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
"first" - Google News
July 14, 2020 at 07:55PM
https://ift.tt/30cQvTr
U.S. Executes First Federal Inmate Since 2003 - The Wall Street Journal
"first" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QqCv4E
https://ift.tt/3bWWEYd
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "U.S. Executes First Federal Inmate Since 2003 - The Wall Street Journal"
Post a Comment