From Reuters:
“U.S. carries out first execution
in 17 years after overnight Supreme Court ruling”
The U.S. government carried out
its first execution in 17 years on Tuesday, putting to death convicted murderer
Daniel Lee over objections by his victims’ relatives after the Supreme Court
cleared the way with an overnight ruling. Lee, 47, was pronounced dead at 8:07
a.m. EDT (1207 GMT) at the federal execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana,
the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said. His death marked the culmination of a
three-year effort by Republican President Donald Trump’s administration to
resume capital punishment, ending a de facto moratorium by his Democratic
predecessor, Barack Obama, amid legal challenges and difficulties obtaining
lethal-injection drugs. [nL1N2EG2ML] “The American people have made the
considered choice to permit capital punishment for the most egregious federal
crimes, and justice was done today in implementing the sentence for Lee’s
horrific offenses,” U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in a statement. Lee’s
lawyers complained that the government had acted in haste and that they
received no notification of his rescheduled execution after a remaining legal
obstacle that had not been addressed by the Supreme Court was cleared shortly
after dawn. Just 10 minutes passed between the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals revoking the last outstanding injunction stopping Lee’s execution, in
an order at 7:36 a.m. (1136 GMT), and the curtain in the execution chamber
being pulled back at 7:46 a.m. (1146 GMT) to reveal Lee strapped to a gurney. The
execution had previously been scheduled for Monday at 4 p.m. (2000 GMT), but
was again delayed, with hours to spare, when a U.S. District Court in
Washington ordered the U.S. Justice Department to delay Lee’s and three other
executions scheduled for July and August to allow the continuation of legal
challenges by death row inmates. In issuing her injunction, Judge Tanya Chutkan
had said Lee and other condemned men were likely to succeed in their argument
that the new lethal-injection protocol announced last year that uses a single
drug, the barbiturate pentobarbital, would cause an unconstitutional degree of
pain and suffering. Her order was affirmed overnight by an appellate court. But
at 2:10 a.m. (0610 GMT), the Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote ruled that challenges
by Lee and other condemned men to the execution protocol did not justify
“last-minute” intervention by federal courts. “Last-minute stays like that
issued this morning should be the extreme exception, not the norm,” the Supreme
Court wrote in its unsigned ruling. Ruth Friedman, one of the public defenders
who had represented Lee, rebuked the Justice Department for what she described
as a rushed process, saying lawyers did not learn his execution was underway
until after his death. In a statement, she said “it is beyond shameful that the
government, in the end, carried out this execution in haste, in the middle of
the night, while the country was sleeping. We hope that upon awakening, the
country will be as outraged as we are.”
A Justice Department official
said that the Bureau of Prisons had notified Lee’s counsel soon after the
earlier Supreme Court ruling, but that there was no need to give further
notification after the later ruling by the 8th Circuit. Lee, who once espoused
white supremacist beliefs, was convicted for his role in the killing of three
members of an Arkansas family in 1996. But some relatives of his victims
opposed him receiving the death sentence, while his accomplice in the murders,
Chevie Kehoe, was sentenced to life in prison. The victims’ relatives
unsuccessfully sued last week to delay the execution until the coronavirus
pandemic had passed, saying they feared attending would risk their safety. Lee
spent four hours strapped to the gurney while the final legal challenges played
out, his lawyers and a witness said. He was then asked if had any last words,
according to a media witness in the viewing chamber. “I didn’t do it. I’ve made
a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer,” Lee said, according to
the media witness, who issued a report for other news outlets. “You’re killing
an innocent man.” As the drug was being administered, Lee raised his head to
look around, and his breathing appeared to become labored, according to the
pool report. Soon after, Lee’s chest was no longer moving, his lips turned blue
and his fingers became ashy. Two unnamed Bureau of Prisons officials and Lee’s
spiritual adviser could be seen inside the execution chamber. The Justice
Department has scheduled two more executions of convicted child killers this
week: Wesley Ira Purkey on Wednesday and Dustin Honken on Friday. An appeals
court has temporarily stayed Purkey’s execution date, and it remained unclear
whether it would proceed.
^ I believe in the Death Penalty
is cases of murder and terrorism. I know that is not the trendy thing to
believe nowadays, but it just seems wrong to give a murderer a few years behind
bars (where they can work, earn money, get a degree, etc.) while they took away
a life that will never return. People who are against the Death Penalty say
that every life is precious and yet they turn the life of the murdered victim
into something cheap by not really punishing the person who killed them. The
Federal Government has become the last stand for many US States that did away
with the Death Penalty and I am glad to see that Federal executions have
restarted. A case in point: Massachusetts did away with its Death Penalty in
1984 and then the Boston Marathon Bombing occurred in 2013 in which 3 people
were killed and 264 wounded. The Massachusetts Judicial System would only be
able to give a slap on the wrist to the terrorist,
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, thankfully terrorism is a Federal crime and so Tsarnaev was
sentenced to death – which is up for appeal. The US Federal Government is the
only one able to give the victims and their families the respect for what they
have lost since the Commonwealth (that’s just a fancy name for State) of Massachusetts
will not. While I do firmly believe in the Death Penalty for murder and terrorism
I also believe that there has to be a set of strict protocols and an appeals
process that has to happen from the time of the conviction and sentencing to being
actually put to death to ensure that an innocent person is not punished (ie.
killed.) I am not one of those people who simply believes that the sentence
should be carried out immediately after it is announced or that the Death
Penalty should be used for every crime. There is a time and a place for it.
This was clearly the time and the place. ^
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