Daniel Lewis Lee: US carries out first federal execution in 17 years
The US has carried out its first federal execution in 17-years killing, by lethal injection, a white supremacist who killed and tortured a family in the 1990s.
Daniel Lewis Lee’s execution was delayed on Monday by a District Court following days of legal challenges against a new injection protocol, but in the early hours of Tuesday the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that it could go ahead.
Lee, 47, from Yuton Oklahoma, professed his innocence before his execution at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and said “I didn’t do it, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I am not a murderer.”
His final words were: “You're killing an innocent man.”
The decision to move ahead with the first of three executions, scheduled for this week by the Bureau of Prisons since 2003, faced strong condemnation from civil rights groups and the relatives of Lee’s victims who had sued to stop it, citing concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.
Relatives of Lee’s victims opposed the penalty and wanted him to serve life in prison, noting Lee’s co-defendant Chevie Kehoe received a life sentence.
“For us it is a matter of being there and saying, this is not being done in our name, we do not want this,” relative Monica Veillette said.
In 1995, Daniel Lewis Lee was recruited into a white supremacist group called the Aryan Peoples Republic by reputed ring leader and co-defendant Chevie Kehoe.
Two years later, they were arrested and charged for murdering and torturing gun dealer William Mueller, his wife Nancy and her eight-year-old daughter, Sahra Powell in Tilly, Arkansas.
Prosecutors at the pair’s trial in 1999 said that Lee and Kehoe tortured the family of three before stealing guns and $50,000 in cash as part of a plan to set up a whites-only nation.
Federal executions are rare, and the US government has only ever executed three defendants at federal level since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988.
The last federal death penalty was on March 18, 2003, when inmate Louis Jones Jr, a 53-year-old Gulf War veteran who murdered 19-year-old soldier Tracie Joy McBride was executed.
In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma the Justice Department was directed to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs, by then-President Barack Obama.
Last year the Trump administration said it would resume federal executions after a nearly twenty-year hiatus, at the time Attorney General William Barr said the justice department had a duty to carry out sentences imposed by the courts, including death penalties, and to bring a sense of closure to those in the communities where the killings happened.
There have been two state executions since the coronavirus lockdown in mid-March, according to the Death and Penalty Information Centre (DPIC).
According to data complied by DCIP, the overall numbers of executions have steadily fallen since the 2003 execution, with 59 people executed in 2004, and 22 in 2019.
Two other federal executions are scheduled for later this week, although one is on hold following a separate legal claim.