The Supreme Court denied a convicted murderer’s Thursday appeal, allowing the execution to move forward just before midnight. It was the eighth federal execution since Attorney General William Barr greenlighted the punishment this summer and the first of three scheduled for convicted killers during the transition period for President-elect Joe Biden, who now opposes capital punishment.
Orlando Hall, a drug dealer who kidnapped, raped, bludgeoned, soaked in gasoline, then buried alive a 16-year-old Texas girl in 1994, was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, more than two decades after his 1996 jury conviction. The execution of the 49-year-old followed the Supreme Court letting it move forward late Thursday night with only a minority of the justices — Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — voting to stay punishment. Lisa Montgomery, found guilty of strangling a pregnant woman to death and cutting her open to kidnap her child in 2004, and Brandon Bernard, found guilty of murdering husband and wife who were youth pastors on a military reservation in 1999, are slated to be executed at the same prison on Dec. 8 and Dec. 10, respectively.
Barr, who in the summer of 2019 unveiled new guidelines for resuming capital punishment under federal law following a hiatus stemming back to 2003, announced the resumption of federal executions this summer.
“The American people, acting through Congress and Presidents of both political parties, have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death,” Barr said, adding that “we owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”
In response to Barr’s announcement last year, then-candidate Biden tweeted, “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty.” Biden’s campaign website stated that “Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example. These individuals should instead serve life sentences without probation or parole.”
The Biden transition team did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s questions about his views on the two convicted murderers scheduled to be executed next month and about the specifics of what he would do as president about the death penalty.
Last week, a number of Democratic lawmakers wrote to Barr. “We urge you to suspend all federal executions so the incoming Biden-Harris administration can evaluate and determine the future use of the death penalty by the federal government. The failure to do so will cause irrevocable injustice,” they said.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Daniel Lee, a member of a white supremacist group who was convicted of killing a family of three by weighing them down with rocks before tossing them into a bayou, was executed on July 14, 2020, in the first federal execution since Louis Jones Jr. was put to death on March 18, 2003, for the rape and murder of Pvt. Tracie McBride.
Soon after, Welsey Ira Purkey, who was convicted of raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl before dismembering and burning her body and dumping it in a septic pond, was executed July 16. Dustin Lee Honken, who shot and killed five people, including a single mother, her 10-year-old and 6-year-old daughters, and two men who planned to testify against him, was executed July 17. Lezmond Mitchell, who murdered a grandmother and her 9-year-old granddaughter, was executed Aug. 26. Keith Dwayne Nelson, who kidnapped a 10-year-old girl who was rollerblading in front of her house, raped her, and then strangled her to death with a wire in the forest behind a church, was executed on Aug. 28. William LeCroy, Jr., who robbed, raped, and murdered a 30-year-old nurse, was executed Sept. 22. And Christopher Vialva, involved in the same double murder as Bernard, was executed Sept. 24.
Biden changed his position on the death penalty after Barr’s announcement in the summer of 2019, calling for its abolition despite having been among the Senate’s most vocal supporters, previously bragging that in one of his proposals, “We do everything but hang people for jaywalking.” Biden reversed his decadeslong position last summer during the Democratic primary while under pressure from his liberal base and his rivals, releasing a criminal justice reform plan repudiating his signature 1994 crime bill and calling for the “elimination” of the death penalty nationwide.
The former vice president and senator introduced a crime bill in March 1991, proposing 44 crimes punishable by death. When Republicans introduced their own version a day later, increasing that number to 46, Biden went beyond President George H.W. Bush’s supporters that June by raising it to 51. When Biden’s crime bill finally passed that year, it created 60 new death penalty offenses. As recently as 2000, Biden claimed credit for passing “the first federal death penalty” following the Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling which voided capital punishment laws, with Biden saying executions were nationalized through “a bill written by me” in 1988 and that his 1994 crime bill “had the death penalty at the federal level” too.
As part of DOJ’s federal protocol addendum last year, Barr directed the federal government to change the cocktail of three drugs used for federal executions to just a single drug: phenobarbital, a barbiturate that in high doses causes respiratory arrest. The use of the drug was upheld by numerous courts, including the Supreme Court, as consistent with the Eighth Amendment, and it has been used in the executions of hundreds of inmates on the state level in more than a dozen different states since 2010.
A majority of the public still support the death penalty for convicted murderers by a margin of 55%-43%, according to Gallup’s annual survey, but those numbers have been on a slow but steady decline since the mid-1990s when 80% of people supported capital punishment, and only 16% were opposed.
