TERRE HAUTE, Ind. – A US district judge on Monday ordered a further delay in federal executions, hours before the first lethal injection was scheduled for 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.
The new suspension of executions came a day after a federal appeals court suspended the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee of Yukon, Oklahoma, which is scheduled for 4 pm EDT Monday at Terre Haute Federal Prison, 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 scheduled execution, the first of a federal prisoner to be sentenced to death since 2003, would take place after a federal appeals court lifted a mandate Sunday that had been implemented last week after the victims’ family argue that they would be at high risk for coronaviruses 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 more scheduled later in the week, during a global health pandemic that killed more than 135,000 people in the United States and is devastating prisons across the country, generated scrutiny from civil rights groups and the family of Lee’s Victims.
It 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 high on the list of American 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 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. 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 team. specialized sent to prison. to handle execution.
The victim’s family hopes that there will never be an execution. They have asked the Justice Department and President Donald Trump not to move forward with the execution and have long called for him to be given a life sentence.
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.
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. soldier in 1995.. 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 Barack Obama ordered the Justice Department to conduct a comprehensive review of capital punishment 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. 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.
