Judge halts 2nd federal execution — for now
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — A judge on Wednesday halted the execution of a man, said to be suffering from dementia, who was set to die by lethal injection in the federal government’s second execution this week after a 17-year hiatus.
Legal wrangling continued Wednesday night with execution still possible.
Wesley Ira Purkey, convicted of a gruesome 1998 kidnapping and killing, was scheduled to die at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., where Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death Tuesday after his eleventh-hour legal bids failed.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., imposed two injunctions prohibiting the federal Bureau of Prisons from moving forward with Purkey’s execution, but the Justice Department immediately appealed. Late Wednesday, an appeals court panel upheld one of the two injunctions, ruling Purkey should get the chance to pursue his claim that he should not be put to death because he doesn’t understand why he is being executed.
Appeals to the Supreme Court were still pending.
It all suggested a volley of litigation would continue into the evening. One of the injunctions imposed Wednesday would halt not only Purkey’s execution, but another that has been scheduled for Friday and one in August.
Earlier Wednesday, the Supreme Court ended a separate stay by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.
Lee, convicted of killing an Arkansas family in a 1990s plot to build a whites-only nation, was the first of four condemned men scheduled to die in July and August despite the coronavirus pandemic raging inside and outside prisons.
Purkey, 68, of Lansing, Kan., would be the second.
Chutkan didn’t rule on whether Purkey was competent but said the court needed to evaluate the claim. She said there was no question he’d suffer “irreparable harm” if he was put to death before his claim could be evaluated.
Purkey was sentenced to death in the killing of 16-year-old Jennifer Long in Kansas City, Mo. Prosecutors said he raped and stabbed her, dismembered her with a chainsaw, burned the body and dumped her ashes in a pond in Kansas.
But the legal questions of whether he was mentally fit then are different from whether he’s fit now. Purkey’s lawyers argue he clearly isn’t, saying in recent filings he suffers from Alzheimer’s.
“As his dementia has progressed, he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him,” lawyer Rebecca Woodman said.
Purkey believes his planned execution is part of a conspiracy, Woodman said. In other filings, they describe delusions that people were spraying poison into his room and that drug dealers implanted a device in his chest meant to kill him.