Justice Department plows ahead with execution plan
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is moving ahead with its plan to resume federal executions this week, despite the coronavirus pandemic raging both inside and outside prisons and stagnating national support for the death penalty.
Determined to proceed with the first federal execution in nearly two decades, the Justice Department plans to appeal a judge’s ruling that would halt authorities from carrying it out on Monday.
Daniel Lee, 47, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection. Lee, of Yukon, Okla., was convicted in Arkansas of the 1996 killings of gun dealer William Mueller, his wife and her 8-year-old daughter.
Chief District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson ruled Friday that the execution would be put on hold because the family’s concern about the pandemic, which has killed more than 130,000 people and is ravaging prisons nationwide.
Lee and two others are scheduled to die by lethal injection in one week at an Indiana prison. Bureau of Prisons officials insist they will be able to conduct the executions safely and have been holding practice drills for months.
Family members of the victims and the inmates will be able to attend but will be required to wear face masks. Prison officials will take temperature checks. The agency will also make personal protective equipment, including masks, gloves, gowns and face shields, available for witnesses, but there are no plans to test anyone attending the executions for COVID-19, officials said.
The decision to go ahead with the executions has been criticized as a dangerous and political move by an administration that at times seems disinterested in addressing racial disparities in the death penalty and larger criminal justice system. Critics argue the government is instead creating an unnecessary and manufactured urgency around a topic that isn’t high on the list of American concerns right now, when more than 130,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States and the unemployment rate is 11%.
“Why would anybody who is concerned about public health and safety want to bring in people from all over the country for three separate executions in the span of five days to a virus hot spot?” questioned Robert Dunham, of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonpartisan organization that collects information on capital punishment.
Attorney General William Barr has denied that politics played a role in the decision last year to resume executions, which ended an informal freeze on imposition of federal capital punishment. Mr. Barr has said the government has an obligation to carry out the sentences, including the death penalty, that are imposed by courts, and that the Justice Department owes it to the families of the victims and others in their communities to do so.
“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,” Mr. Barr said in a statement last month.
The percentage of Americans in favor of the death penalty stood at 60% in the 2018 General Social Survey, a longrunning trends survey. That’s about where it was in the 1970s. Support has steadily ticked back down after peaking at 75% in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Most Democrats oppose it. By contrast, President Donald Trump has spoken often about capital punishment and his belief that executions serve as an effective deterrent and an appropriate punishment for some crimes, including mass shootings and the killings of police officers.