A self-proclaimed white supremacist who tortured and killed an Arkansas family, including an 8-year-old girl, was executed Tuesday morning in Indiana.
Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital at 8:07 a.m., just a few hours after the Supreme Court authorized the first federal execution since 2003.
THE EXECUTION OF DANIEL LEE MAY CONTINUE, FEDERAL COURT RULES
In this Oct. 31, 1997 file photo, Daniel Lewis Lee awaits his murder prosecution hearing at the Pope County Detention Center in Russellville, Arkansas.
(The Courier via AP)
He was taken to the execution chamber at the Terre Haute, Indiana federal penitentiary, tied to a stretcher, with more than half of his body covered in a light blue blanket.
The IV tubes went through a metal panel in the walls and Lee took a deep breath before injecting the drug into his body, moving his legs and feet. He muttered to himself briefly as his chest kept rising and falling. At one point, while administering the drug, he raised his head to look around. With his head slightly cocked to the left, his breathing seemed labored. In a few moments, Lee’s chest was no longer moving, his lips turned blue and his fingers turned ashen.
Lee was convicted of multiple crimes, including three counts of murder in aid of organized crime in the 1996 killings of William Frederick Mueller, his wife Nancy Ann Mueller and their 8-year-old stepdaughter, Sarah Elizabeth Powell, in Arkansas.
Mueller was a local arms dealer, and the bodies of him and his family were discovered five months after his disappearance. They were shot dead and covered with plastic bags sealed over their heads. Their bodies were weighed down by rocks and thrown into the Illinois swamp.
“I didn’t,” Lee said Tuesday, looking directly into the window of the media witness room before he was executed. “I have made many mistakes in my life but I am not a murderer.”
His last words: “You are killing an innocent man.”
Round-trip legal procedures paralyzed execution several times.
Hours before his death, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote overturned a lower court order to delay four executions scheduled for July and August.
Judge Tanya Chutkan of the United States District Court in Washington had issued the preliminary injunction against executions citing problems with the lethal injection methods used by the government, but the Supreme Court disagreed.
“The government has produced its own competing expert testimony, indicating that any pulmonary edema occurs only after the prisoner has died or has become completely insensitive,” the Supreme Court said in its ruling.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit also reversed a court order established last week by a district court after the family of victims said the coronavirus would pose a health risk and prevent them from exercising their right. to attend the execution in prison, where several people have been infected with COVID-19.
Lee’s attorneys and the victim’s family members have long fought for Lee to get a life sentence and not be sentenced to death, without success.
Attorney General William Barr has told The Associated Press in recent days that he believes the Bureau of Prisons could “carry out these executions without being at risk.”
The agency has implemented a number of additional measures, including temperature controls and requiring witnesses to wear masks.
The execution is the first after the Trump administration announced last year that it would return to capital punishment methods.
Two more executions are scheduled this week, Wesley Ira Purkey on Wednesday and Dustin Lee Honken on Friday.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP
A fourth man, Keith Dwayne Nelson, is scheduled to be executed in August.
Jake Gibson of Fox News contributed to this report.
