The Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to allow the Trump administration to carry out the first federal execution since 2003 exposed splintered support for the president from religious conservatives on the issue.
The execution, performed hours after a 5-4 Supreme Court decision gave the Justice Department the green light, was performed on Daniel Lewis Lee, who was sentenced to death in 1999 for robbing a family at gunpoint and then drowning them in an Illinois bayou. Before the procedure took place on Tuesday morning, Lee insisted that he was innocent.
Lee was the first of several prisoners scheduled for execution after Attorney General William Barr last year announced that the federal government would resume the practice, rolling back an Obama-era freeze. At the time, Barr’s announcement was met with widespread disapproval from religious leaders, most prominently from those in the Catholic Church, which institutionally opposes the death penalty.
Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, the executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, a right-leaning advocacy group, called the execution “unnecessary and avoidable.”
In the weeks before Lee’s execution, people close to him petitioned the federal government to change its policy. Earlene Peterson, the mother of one of the people Lee murdered, said that she did not think it was right for Lee to be executed. She requested in late June that President Trump instead commute Lee’s sentence to life imprisonment.
“As a supporter of President Trump, I pray that he will hear my message,” she said in a statement. “The scheduled execution of Danny Lee for the murder of my daughter and granddaughter is not what I want and would bring my family more pain.”
Mark O’Keefe, a Catholic priest ministering to several people set to be executed this week after Lee, also sent a petition to the federal government along with family members of other people murdered, asking that the procedures be delayed, citing health concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic.
An appeals court found coronavirus-related requests “frivolous.” Peterson did not receive a response from the administration before the execution took place.
Lee’s execution came after Barr in June asked the Bureau of Prisons to schedule the executions of four people on death row convicted of murdering children. The Supreme Court decided in an unsigned opinion at 2 a.m. Tuesday that the methods of lethal injection in the procedures would not cause the inmates undue pain.
More than 1,000 religious leaders in early July signed an open letter to the Trump administration asking that it “stop the scheduled federal executions.”
“We should be focused on protecting and preserving life, not carrying out executions,” wrote Catholic, Methodist, and evangelical leaders in a joint statement.
Other Christian leaders also wrote letters urging the Justice Department to reconsider resuming the death penalty. Charles Thompson, the archbishop of the Catholic Diocese of Indianapolis, in which the execution took place, wrote that any execution, “no matter how ‘sanitary’ or ‘humane,’ is always an act of violence.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in a June statement asked Trump and Barr to change their position on the death penalty, linking the issue to the administration’s strong stance against abortion.
“To oppose the death penalty is not to be ‘soft on crime,’” the bishops said in a joint statement. “Rather, it is to be strong on the dignity of life.”
Shortly after the procedure took place, Barr said that Lee received “the justice he deserved.”
“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,” Barr said in a statement.
Most states have abolished the death penalty, and only three federal executions have occurred since the practice was reinstated in 1988. A June Gallup poll showed a steady decline in public support for the death penalty over the past 20 years.
