Terre Haute, Indiana – The federal government plans to carry out the first federal execution in nearly two decades on Monday, more than the objection of the family of the victims and after a series of legal proceedings on the coronavirus pandemic.
Daniel Lewis Lee of Yukon, Oklahoma is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 4 p.m. Monday in federal prison in Indiana. He was convicted in Arkansas of the 1996 murders of the arms dealer William Mueller, his wife, Nancy, and their 8-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell.
Dan Pierce / The Courier via AP
The execution, the first of a federal prisoner sentenced to death since 2003, comes after a federal appeals court lifted a court order Sunday that had been implemented last week after the victims’ family argued that they would be at high risk for coronavirus if they had to travel to attend the execution. The family had promised to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The decision to go ahead with the execution, and two others scheduled later in the week, during a global health pandemic that killed more than 135,000 people and is devastating prisons across the country attracted scrutiny from civil rights groups. and the family of Lee’s victims.
The decision has been criticized as a dangerous and political movement. Critics argue that the government is creating an unnecessary and manufactured urgency around an issue that is not on the list of Americans’ concerns at the moment. It’s also likely to add a new front to the national conversation about criminal justice reform in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.
In an interview with The Associated Press last week, Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department has a duty to uphold court-imposed sentences, including the death penalty, and to give a sense of closure to victims already those in the communities where the murders occurred.
But family members of those killed by Lee strongly oppose that idea. They wanted to be present to counter any claims that it was being made on their behalf.
“For us it is a matter of being there and saying, ‘This is not being done on our behalf; we do not want this,'” said relative Monica Veillette.
Relatives would travel thousands of miles and witness the execution in a small room where the recommended social distancing to prevent the spread of the virus is virtually impossible.
The federal prison system has struggled in recent months to contain the explosive number of coronavirus cases behind bars. There are currently four confirmed cases of coronavirus among inmates at Terre Haute Prison, according to federal statistics, and one inmate there has died.
“The federal government has put this family in an unsustainable position to choose between their right to witness the execution of Danny Lee and their own health and safety,” the family’s attorney, Baker Kurrus, said Sunday.
Barr said 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.
On Sunday, the Justice Department revealed that a staff member involved in preparing for the execution had tested positive for the coronavirus, but said he had not been in the execution chamber and had not contacted anyone on the specialized team. sent to prison to handle the execution.
The victim’s family hopes that there will never be an execution. They have asked the Justice Department and President Trump not to go ahead with the execution, and have long called for Lee to be sentenced to life in prison.
The three men scheduled to be executed this week had been scheduled to be executed when Barr announced that the federal government would resume executions last year, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the matter was removed from the public domain. . A fourth man is slated to be executed in August.
The Justice Department had scheduled five executions scheduled to start in December, but some of the inmates contested the new procedures in court, arguing that the government was circumventing the proper methods of executing prisoners quickly.
Executions at the federal level have been rare, and the government has executed only three accused since he reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988, most recently in 2003, when Louis Jones was executed for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young woman in 1995. soldier.
Although there has been no federal execution since 2003, the Justice Department has continued to approve death penalty prosecutions, and federal courts have sentenced the accused to death.
In 2014, after a failed state execution in Oklahoma, President Obama ordered the Justice Department to conduct a comprehensive review of the death penalty and lethal injection drug-related problems.
Barr said last July that the Obama era review had been completed, clearing the way for executions to resume. It approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaces the three-drug combination previously used in federal executions with one drug, pentobarbital. This is similar to the procedure used in several states, including Georgia, Missouri, and Texas, but not all.
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