The United States government plans to carry out the first federal execution in nearly two decades, despite objections from the victims’ families and after a series of legal proceedings related to the risks caused by 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 murders of William Mueller, an arms dealer, his wife, Nancy, and their eight-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell, in 1996.
The execution, the first by a federal inmate sentenced to death since 2003, comes after a federal appeals court lifted a court order on Sunday that had been implemented last week after the victims’ family argued that they would be at high risk of coronavirus if they had to travel to attend the execution. The family had promised to appeal to the supreme court.
The decision to proceed 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, generated 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 high on the list of Americans’ concerns during the pandemic. It is also likely to revive the national conversation on criminal justice reform in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.
Last week, Attorney General William Barr said the justice department had a duty to uphold court-imposed sentences and to give a sense of closure to victims and people in the communities where the killings occurred.
However, relatives of those killed by Lee strongly oppose that view and wanted to be present at the execution 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 Monica Veillette, a relative.
The family would have to travel thousands of miles and witness the execution in a small room where social distancing is practically impossible. The federal prison system has struggled in recent months to contain the explosive number of coronavirus cases behind bars.
There are four confirmed cases of coronavirus among inmates at Terre Haute prison, where the execution will take place.
“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,” said the family’s attorney, Baker Kurrus.
Barr said he believed that the Bureau of Prisons could carry out executions without putting anyone at risk.
On Sunday, the Justice Department revealed that a staff member involved in preparing for the execution had tested positive for 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 has asked the justice department and Donald Trump not to continue the execution.
The three men who were to be executed this week had been scheduled to be executed when Barr announced last year that the federal government would resume executions, ending an informal moratorium on the federal capital punishment. 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 defendants since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988. Although there has been no federal execution since 2003, the justice department has continued to pass sentence prosecutions The federal courts have sentenced the defendants 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.
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