Supreme Court allows federal execution
2 a.m. 5-4 decision paves way for lethal injection
The Trump administration on Tuesday morning carried out the first federal execution since 2003, following a series of court battles and a Supreme Court order, released shortly after 2 a.m., clearing the way for the lethal injection to take place.
Federal officials executed Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, who was convicted in 1999 of killing a family of three, at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. Lee was pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m. Tuesday, the Bureau of Prisons said.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer,” Lee said when asked if he wanted to make a final statement, according to the pool report. His final words were: “You’re killing an innocent man.”
Although the death penalty has been in decline nationwide for years, with executions and death sentences down significantly, the Justice Department has publicly pushed against that trend for nearly a year. The department has argued in court and in public statements that it needed to carry out lawful sentences, citing the gravity of the crimes involved.
Last year, the department laid out a new lethal injection protocol — using one drug, pentobarbital — and said it would begin carrying out executions, leading to extended legal challenges. Attorney General William Barr had said recently that officials “owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind.”
Lee had challenged his execution on his own and along with other death-row inmates. His execution was also opposed by some relatives of his victims, who argued against his death sentence in the case and sought to stop his lethal injection from taking place amid the coronavirus pandemic.
On Monday, Lee’s lethal injection — originally scheduled for 4 p.m. that afternoon — was left on hold following a judge’s order that he and other death-row inmates could pursue their court cases arguing that the new lethal-injection protocol is unconstitutional.
An appeals court said late Monday that it would not let the executions take place as planned, but a divided Supreme Court weighed in overnight saying they could proceed.
In an unsigned 5-4 order, the court’s conservative justices said the prisoners on death row had “not made the showing required to justify last-minute intervention.”
“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,” said the opinion, which quoted court precedents.
Although the author is unclear, the opinion was the work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
The court has just finished a term that at times blurred the ideological lines that divide the justices. But the death penalty remains an area where their differences remain stark.
The court’s four liberal justices wrote two dissents. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, said that the court was “hastily” ending the inmates’ challenges and that as a result, there would “be no meaningful judicial review of the grave, fact-heavy challenges” they brought. Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Ginsburg, reiterated his view that the court should examine whether the death penalty itself is unconstitutional.