Terre Haute, Indiana – A U.S. district judge on Monday ordered a further delay in federal executions, hours before first lethal injection It was scheduled to take place in federal prison in Indiana. The Trump administration immediately appealed to a higher court, calling for executions to move forward.
United States District Judge Tanya Chutkan said there are still legal problems to resolve and that “the public does not receive a legitimate judicial short circuit.” The executions, driven by the administration, would be the first carried out at the federal level since 2003.
Chutkan said inmates have presented evidence showing that the government’s plan to use only pentobarbital to carry out executions “poses an unconstitutionally significant risk of serious pain.”
Chutkan said the inmates produced evidence that, in other executions, the prisoners who received pentobarbital suffered “sudden pulmonary edema,” which she says interferes with breathing and produces choking and strangling sensations.
The inmates have identified alternatives, including using an opioid or an anti-anxiety medication at the start of the procedure or a completely different method, a firing squad, Chutkan said.
The Department of Justice appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Circuit of the District of Columbia, and the Bureau of Prisons continued preparations to move forward should the suspension be lifted. The man scheduled for the execution, Daniel Lewis Lee has had access to social visitors, has visited his spiritual advisor and has been allowed to receive mail, prison officials said. It has been under constant supervision of the staff. Lee’s witnesses are expected to include three family members, his lawyers, and his spiritual advisor.
Dan Pierce / The Courier via AP
The new hold came a day after a federal appeals court suspended the execution of Lee from Yukon, Oklahoma, which was scheduled for 4 p.m. ET Monday at federal prison in Terre Haute, 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.
“The government has been trying to move forward with these executions despite many unanswered questions about the legality of its new execution protocol,” said Shawn Nolan, one of the lawyers for the men facing federal execution.
Lee’s execution would take place after a federal appeals court lifted a mandate Sunday that it had been launched last week after members of the victims’ families argued that they would be at high risk of contracting the coronavirus if they had to travel to attend. The family appealed to the Supreme Court on Monday.
The decision to go ahead with the execution, and two others scheduled later in the week, during a global health pandemic that has killed more than 135,000 people in the United States and is devastating prisons across the country, attracted scrutiny. from civil and family rights groups. of Lee’s victims.
Critics argue that the government is creating an unnecessary and manufactured urgency for political gain. Developments are likely to add a new front to the national conversation on criminal justice reform in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.
Protesters against the death penalty began to gather in Terre Haute on Monday. Organizer Abraham Bonowitz drove a pickup truck through town with a sign on the side of a trailer saying, “Stop the executions now!”
Due to coronavirus concerns, Bonowitz said his group, Death Penalty Action, was not encouraging others to appear. More than a dozen protesters were not expected to join him.
“It is symbolic,” Bonowitz said of the protests. “We are here to say that this is wrong.”
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 done on our behalf; we don’t 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. An attorney for family members who opposed the execution said they had not traveled to Indiana until Monday morning.
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.
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.
But 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 team. specialized dispatched to handle execution.
The three men scheduled to be executed this week had been 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.
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. soldier in 1995..
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.
The attorney general said last July that the Obama-era review had been completed, clearing the way for executions to resume.
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