The planned federal execution of the killer of a 10-year-old Kansas girl was back on track Friday after an appeals panel overturned a lower court ruling that required the government to obtain a prescription for drugs before it could use pentobarbital to kill the prisoner.
Questions about whether pentobarbital causes pain prior to death have been a focus of last-minute calls for Keith Nelson, who would be the fifth person to die this year and the second this week in a recurrence. of the Trump administration of federal executions after a 17-year hiatus. All executions by lethal pentobarbital injection were carried out in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
If Nelson’s lawyer appeals to the Supreme Court on Friday over the prescriptive issue, the decision on whether Nelson is alive or dead could still come down to the entire court. But similar moves to delay three other executions failed last month, with the entire court ruling 5-to-4 they can continue.
A stream of submissions by Nelson’s legal team over several weeks zero in on pentobarbital, a barbiturate that depresses the central nervous system and, in high doses, eventually stops the heart.
In one submission in early August, lawyers for the 45-year-old Nelson mentioned an unofficial autopsy performed on one of the prisoners performed last month, William Purkey, and said that it indicated evidence of pulmonary edema in which the lungs were filled with fluid and a painful feeling. caused as drowning.
In her now-reversed verdict, U.S. Judge Tanya Chutkan stopped Nelson’s execution early Thursday, saying that laws governing medicine need the prescriptions, even for executions. Government lawyers made an appeal and within a few hours, a panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismissed Chutkan’s order with little explanation.
Nelson’s crime was horrific by any measure.
Then in his mid-20s, Nelson grabbed 10-year-old Pamela Butler from the street and threw her into the light of his truck on October 12, 1999. The fifth-grade student had returned to her Kansas City, Kansas, home on inline skates after buying cookies at a store. As he left, he made a rude gesture against Butler’s sister, who saw the attack and screamed. Circumstances got his license plate.
Keith D. Nelson, seen in an undated photo, will be executed in the brutal murder of 10-year-old Pamela Butler.
(AP Photo / The Kansas City Star, File)
Nelson, who did not know Butler or her family before, told an employee a month earlier that he intended to find a female to kidnap, torture, rape and kill because he expected to return to the jail on other charges, prosecutors said,
After raping Butler, Nelson strangled her with a wire and dumped her body in a wooded area near a Missouri church.
In a 2018 verdict, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Nelson showed no remorse at a sentencing hearing and instead “blamed the district court and the victim’s family with a tirade with libel.”
Butler’s mother, Cherri West, hoped Nelson’s execution would bring her some peace after living for decades with the pain of her daughter’s last hours.
“Knowing that that was the last face she saw on this earth before he took her, and having to know how scared she was and what he was doing to her, literally ate me up.”
A sign of no offense for the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, India, where the execution will take place.
(AP Photo / Michael Conroy, File)
With the execution Wednesday of Lezmond Mitchell – the only Indian on federal death row – the federal government under President Donald Trump registered more executions in 2020 than in the previous 56 years combined.
The executions of Nelson and Mitchell were planned for the same week as the Republican National Convention, where many Trump supporters sought to portray him as a candidate for law and order.
“The death penalty is not about justice, it’s about politics,” Nelson lawyer Dale Baich said.
Nelson’s current lawyers said Nelson’s lawyers in the 2001 sentencing of his case must have emphasized mitigating evidence, including that Nelson had brain damage as a newborn and as a child was abused.
COLLEGE STUDENT, FATHER, ALL SHOT ON FRONT LAWN TO FENDER BENDER
During arguments, prosecutors pointed to Nelson’s twin brother, saying he grew up in equally difficult circumstances but had a good job and did well.
The planned execution of Keith Dwayne Nelson’s government by Friday is set to proceed as planned.
(AP Photo / Michael Conroy, File)
Baich, who said he intended to be a witness at the execution if it happened, said the world would not be safer if his client died.
“If he spent the rest of his life in prison, he would achieve the same goal,” he said.
Government lawyers have defended the use of pentobarbital, arguing that Purkey’s autopsy proved he was suffering. They also quoted the President of the Supreme Court as saying that an execution method is not necessarily cruel and unusual, simply because it causes some pain.
Pentobarbital has some medical uses for humans, although it is often used by veterinarians to euthanize animals.
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Three federal executions placed a cocktail of three drugs in the early 2000s: sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.
But after makers of those drugs objected to their use in executions, states and the federal government shrugged off alternatives. Attorney General William Barr last year approved revised implementation protocols calling for the use of pentobarbital alone.
