U.S. puts PB man to death for raping, killing Texas girl
A Pine Bluff man convicted of kidnapping and raping a 16-year-old Texas girl before dousing her with gasoline and burying her alive, was executed Thursday, the eighth federal inmate put to death this year after a nearly two-decade hiatus.
Orlando Hall, 49, was pronounced dead at 11:47 p.m. after being given a lethal injection at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind., the federal Bureau of Prisons said.
The execution was carried out after the Supreme Court denied last-minute legal challenges from Hall’s attorneys, who had argued that Hall, who was Black, was sentenced on the recommendation of an all-white jury. They also raised concerns about the execution protocol and other constitutional issues.
Hall, 49, was the eighth federal death row inmate put to death since the Trump administration resumed lethal injections earlier this year after a 17-year pause.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who has granted stays for many of the federal death-row inmates only to have them overturned, stated in her opinion that she was granting Hall’s latest motion for a stay. The motion alleged that administering pentobarbital — the single drug used for lethal injections — without a prescription is unlawful.
Hall ran a marijuana-trafficking ring in Pine Bluff and often would buy his product from the Dallas area.
Hall flew to Dallas in 1994 to purchase a large supply of drugs and met two associates to whom he paid $4,700. The men never returned to the meeting place to give Hall the drugs.
Furious about being cheated, Hall and an accomplice found out where the associates lived, staked out the Arlington-area apartment and invited several others to assist them in seeking retribution.
The group of men broke into the apartment and abducted Lisa Rene, the younger sister of one of the men who cheated Hall. Rene was gang-raped and driven 350 miles to Byrd Lake Natural Area in Pine Bluff, where she was bludgeoned and buried.
A judge also ruled Thursday that the federal government must delay until next year the execution of Lisa Montgomery, 52, who was scheduled to be put to death Dec. 8. It was reported that one of Montgomery’s attorneys contracted covid-19 while visiting her in prison.
Montgomery, who would be the first female federal inmate executed in nearly six decades, was convicted in the December 2004 slaying of a pregnant woman.
As for Hall, he was convicted in October 1995 in Texas by an all-white jury. Attorneys for Hall, who is Black, have said the prosecution team at the time kept Black jurors from being impaneled for the trial.
Hall is the second Arkansas killer to die by lethal injection in 2020. On July 14, Daniel Lewis Lee was the first federal death row inmate since 2003 to be executed by the U.S. government.