United States District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, DC, has imposed two injunctions this morning that prohibit the Federal Bureau of Prisons from moving forward with the execution Wesley Ira Purkey. The Justice Department filed immediate appeals in both cases. A separate temporary suspension has already been established from the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Purkey, who is next on the list to be executed by the federal government after a nearly 20-year hiatus, may have a better chance of avoiding the lethal injection because he suffers from dementia, and therefore his lawyers say. cannot understand why it is programmed to die.
He was convicted of kidnapping and murder in 1998, and was scheduled to be executed today at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where reaniel Lewis Lee He was executed Tuesday after late legal offers failed to prevent the first federal execution since 2003.
Purkey, 68, of Lansing, Kansas, would be second, but his lawyers were still expected to push for the supreme court to rule on his jurisdiction.
This competition problem is very important on paper, he said. Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Executions on this issue have been stopped by the Supreme Court in the past. At a minimum, the question of whether Purkey dies will come down to the last minute, report Michael Balsamo and Michael Tarm for the Associated Press.
Purkeys’ mental health issue arose in the run-up to his 2003 trial and when, after the verdict, the jury had to decide whether he should be executed for the murder of a 16-year-old boy. Jennifer Long in Kansas City, Missouri.
Prosecutors alleged that he raped and stabbed her, dismembered her with a chainsaw, burned her, and then dumped her ashes 200 miles (320 km) away in a septic tank in Kansas. Purkey was sentenced separately and sentenced to life in prison for the 80-year-old beating him to death. Mary Ruth Bales, from Kansas City, Kansas.
But legal questions about whether he was mentally fit to be tried or sentenced to death are different from the question of whether he is now mentally prepared enough, in the hours before his scheduled execution, to be executed.
Purkey’s lawyers argue that it clearly isn’t, and say in recent documents that he suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.
He has long accepted responsibility for the crime that put him on death row, said one of these attorneys, Rebecca Woodman. But as his insanity has progressed, he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him. Purkey believes that his planned execution is part of a large conspiracy involving his own lawyers.
While several legal issues in the Purkey case have been settled, reviewed, and resolved by the courts for nearly two decades, the problem of mental fitness for execution can only be addressed once a date is set, according to Dunham, who also teaches law courses in the capital. punishment. Only one date was set last year.
In a landmark 1986 decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution prohibits killing someone who does not have a reasonable understanding of why he is being executed. Involved the case of Alvin ford, who was convicted of murder but whose mental health deteriorated behind bars to the point that, according to his lawyer, he believed he was Pope.
The teenager Purkey’s mother killed, Glenda Lamont, he told the Kansas City Star last year that he planned to attend the execution.
“I don’t want to say I’m happy,” said Lamont. “At the same time, he’s a crazy madman who doesn’t deserve, in my opinion, to keep breathing.”
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