Second federal prisoner in week executed by U.S.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department executed a 68-year-old man Thursday for the gruesome murder in 1998 of a teenage girl, the second time this week the federal government has carried out capital punishment after a 17-year hiatus.

Wesley Ira Purkey was put to death at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., by lethal injection after the Supreme Court rejected the last of a slew of legal challenges including assertions that he was not mentally competent.

The Justice Department announced its intention to bring back federal capital punishment last summer. After a series of court fights over its plan to use a single drug for lethal injection, Attorney General William Barr scheduled four executions for this summer, the first by the federal government since 2003.

Purkey, the second on the list, was convicted of raping, killing and dismembering a 16-year-old girl in Kansas City, Mo.

The Bureau of Prisons put to death Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, on

Tuesday morning for his part in the murder of a family of three. Just hours before, the Supreme Court issued the final go-ahead, ruling in a 5-4 decision in the dead of night that the federal government’s single-drug execution protocol was constitutional. The verdict cleared the way for Lee, Purkey and Dustin Lee Honken, scheduled to die Friday, to be executed this week.

Purkey’s lawyers had argued that he was incompetent to be executed. They said he suffered from schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, which left him unable to comprehend why he was sentenced to death. He believed that his execution was intended as retaliation by the federal government for his frequent complaints about prison conditions, they said.

Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled Wednesday that Purkey’s execution must be delayed until the court could determine whether he was fit to be executed.