The United States government carried out the first federal execution in nearly two decades on Tuesday.
Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, died by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
“I didn’t do it,” Lee said just before he was executed, according to the Associated Press. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer. … You’re killing an innocent man.”
The Federal Bureau of Prisons said Lee was pronounced dead by the county coroner at 8:07 a.m., marking the first federal execution since 2003.
Lee was a member of a white supremacist group who murdered a family of three, parents William Frederick Mueller and Nancy Ann Mueller and their 8-year-old daughter Sarah Elizabeth Powell, according to the Justice Department. He robbed and shot the family, covered and sealed their heads with plastic bags, weighed them down with rocks, and threw them into a bayou. He was convicted by a jury more than 20 years ago.
Hours earlier, the Supreme Court ruled that Lee could be executed even after a lower court issued a ruling to stop it.
The Supreme Court, in their 5-4 ruling, said Lee and the other three death row inmates who sued to stop their executions “have not established that they are likely to succeed” in their challenge, which focused on challenges to the federal government’s lethal injection protocol.
“The plaintiffs in this case are all federal prisoners who have been sentenced to death for murdering children. The plaintiffs committed their crimes decades ago and have long exhausted all avenues for direct and collateral review,” the unsigned opinion stated. “The plaintiffs in this case have not made the showing required to justify last-minute intervention by a Federal Court.”
The Supreme Court concluded: “It is our responsibility to ensure that method-of-execution challenges to lawfully issued sentences are resolved fairly and expeditiously so that the question of capital punishment can remain with the people and their representatives, not the courts, to resolve. In keeping with that responsibility, we vacate the District Court’s preliminary injunction so that the plaintiffs’ executions may proceed as planned.”
The families of Lee’s victims argued earlier this month that Lee should receive life in prison instead.
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee who has been on the bench since 2014, issued an opinion on Monday granting a preliminary injunction on the execution of Lee, which had been scheduled for Monday afternoon, but it went ahead Tuesday morning after an appeal by the Justice Department was followed by the Supreme Court decision.
Lee’s execution came after Attorney General William Barr directed the Bureau of Prisons in June to schedule the executions of four federal death row inmates convicted of murdering children. Barr announced new guidelines last summer for resuming capital punishment under federal law following a hiatus dating back to 2003.
“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. “The four murderers whose executions are scheduled today have received full and fair proceedings under our Constitution and laws. 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.”
Barr announced nearly a year ago that the Bureau of Prisons had adopted an addendum to federal protocol that cleared the way for the U.S. to resume capital punishment.
Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, and Keith Dwayne Nelson are the other convicted murderers who are scheduled for executions soon.
Purkey raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl before dismembering and burning her body and dumping it in a septic pond, the Justice Department said. He also used a claw hammer to beat an 80-year-old woman to death. He was found guilty by a Missouri jury in 2003.
Honken shot and killed five people, according to the Justice Department: a single mother, her 10-year-old and 6-year-old daughters, and two men who had planned to testify against him. He was convicted by an Iowa jury in 2004.
Nelson 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, according to the Justice Department. He pleaded guilty before a Missouri court in 2001.
Purkey’s execution is scheduled for Wednesday, Honken’s execution is scheduled for Friday, and the execution of Nelson is scheduled for late August.
