The deaths of Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey and Dustin Honken roused the anger of civil liberties lawyers, who say the executions were carried out in a rushed and even unlawful manner. The overarching question in public discussion has been “why” — why did Attorney General William Barr make the executions a priority? And why were they carried out while the country was dealing with a pandemic, racial unrest and a looming election?
Protesters kept away from the federal prison in Terre Haute during executions last month have filed a lawsuit in federal court, arguing the Indiana State Police violated their First Amendment rights by erecting roadblocks and preventing them from holding vigils immediately outside the entrance of the facility.
The Justice Department scheduled two additional federal executions on Friday, an announcement that comes weeks after it fought off last-minute legal challenges and successfully resumed federal executions following a 17-year pause.
At a time when the American criminal justice system is under the most intense scrutiny of most of our lives, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling allowing the execution of Daniel Lewis Lee was slap in the face of the victims’ family members who opposed it and a bizarre, out-of-touch, wholly mean-spirited form of justice.
The federal government last week carried out its first executions in almost two decades after the US Supreme Court in separate 5-4 rulings turned away last-minute appeals from two condemned inmates’ legal teams. Their executions, and that of a third defendant, were carried out by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute.
I’m still processing the news that this morning my court-appointed death-row client, Wesley Purkey, was executed. I was his pro bono counsel on three civil-rights/conditions of confinement claims in the Southern District of Indiana. So as I wrestle now — and hopefully for some time — with the legal and moral aspects of capital punishment that otherwise have been remote, it seems appropriate and timely to discuss the needs and opportunities for pro bono service in civil cases in our local federal courts. Both are robust.
Daniel Lewis Lee, a condemned man and convicted murderer, was asked if he wanted to make a final statement from the execution chamber at the federal prison in Terre Haute. He did. He leaned his head up and we locked eyes. “You’re killing an innocent man,” Lee said, looking directly at me. Those were his last words. He said them to me.
The U.S. government on Friday afternoon put to death an Iowa chemistry student-turned-meth kingpin convicted of killing five people, the third execution by the federal government this week at the federal prison in Terre Haute.
A meth kingpin from Iowa who killed five people, including two young girls, is scheduled Friday to become the third federal inmate to be executed this week, following a 17-year pause in federal executions.
The United States on Thursday carried out its second federal execution this week, killing by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute a Kansas man whose lawyers contended he had dementia and was unfit to be executed.
A judge on Wednesday halted the execution of a man said to be suffering from dementia, who had been set to die by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute in the federal government’s second execution after a 17-year hiatus.
The defense team for a man executed in Terre Haute on Tuesday morning in the first federal death sentence carried out in nearly two decades blasted what they called a “shameful” middle-of-the-night process that they contend should awaken public outrage.
The U.S. government on Tuesday carried out the first federal execution in almost two decades, putting to death a man who killed an Arkansas family in a 1990s in a plot to build a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest. The execution came over the objection of the victims’ family.
Family members of three people slain in Arkansas more than 20 years ago have been among the most vocal opponents to the federal government’s plan to execute one of the men convicted of killing their loved ones.
The federal government’s efforts carry out the first federal execution in nearly two decades on Monday in Terre Haute, over the objection of the family of the victims and after a volley of legal proceedings over the coronavirus pandemic, was halted Monday, hours after the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals would have allowed the execution to proceed.
The Justice Department is plowing ahead with its plan to resume federal executions next week for the first time in more than 15 years, despite the coronavirus pandemic raging both inside and outside prisons and stagnating national support for the death penalty.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has temporarily stayed an execution scheduled for next week after finding that two issues raised by a Terre Haute inmate were “worthy of further exploration.” Wesley Ira Purkey’s execution was scheduled for July 15, but now it will be stayed “pending the completion of proceedings in the Seventh Circuit.”
A Zen Buddhist priest, who is a spiritual adviser to one of three federal death row inmates scheduled to be executed this month, filed a lawsuit Thursday arguing the Bureau of Prisons is putting him at risk for the coronavirus by moving forward with executions during a nationwide pandemic.
The Supreme Court of the United States on Monday refused to block the execution of four federal prison inmates who are scheduled to be put to death in July and August. The executions, if permitted to proceed after further expected court challenges, would mark the first use of the death penalty on the federal level since 2003.
The US Supreme Court granted a reprieve Tuesday to a Texas inmate scheduled to die for his conviction of fatally stabbing an 85-year-old woman more than two decades ago, continuing a more than four-month delay of executions in the nation’s busiest death penalty state during the coronavirus pandemic.