Maddie link paedo in jail release bid
IT was just hours after Donald Trump won his battle to resume federal executions following a two-decade gap that the first death row inmate was belted to a gurney.
Daniel Lewis Lee’s execution had been set for 4am on Tuesday morning – just enough time to wake him and march him to the death chamber after Supreme Court judges gave the go-ahead at 2am.
But it was delayed by a last-minute legal question from his lawyers, during which time he stayed strapped to the chair for four hours awaiting his fate.
The 47-year-old white supremacist was finally pronounced dead at 8.07am.
A similar fate now awaits convicts Wesley Purkey and Dustin Honken.
One-eyed Lee had been convicted of killing a family of three, including an eight-yearold girl, using bin bags and duct tape to suffocate his victims. He claimed the courts had ignored DNA evidence that proved his innocence.
His attorney Ruth
Friedman said in a statement: “We hope that upon awakening the country will be as outraged as we are.”
Trump’s only annoyance was probably that the first federal execution in nearly 20 years had taken so long.
When four black boys and one Latino boy, aged 14 to 16, were on trial in 1989 for raping a white woman in Central Park, Trump spent $85,000 to run a fullpage advert in four New York newspapers calling for their executions. After DNA evidence later exonerated the five youngsters, Trump never retracted his statement or apologised. In the years before his election he called for the death penalty for several high-profile criminals. He considered simple execution too humane, telling a US TV programme in 2010: “Now they give a slight injection so that they don’t
Trump wants more executions have pain when the needle goes in, to slowly put them to sleep. These people have to be treated very, very severely.”
Once he took office Trump pushed to revive the federal death penalty.
Dr Alice Storey, a lecturer in law at Birmingham City University who has studied the US death penalty, believes the timing of the move is a campaign ploy ahead of November’s presidential election.
She says: “It could well be that Trump has his eye on the election and wants to send a message to his supporters. If Trump wins a second term I think we’re very likely to see many more federal executions.”
In March, Colorado became the 22nd state to abolish the death penalty.
Reviving the federal death penalty allows Trump to continue to execute people, even in states that now outlaw it. Dr Storey says: “Since Trump replaced two justices and now has five conservatives in the Supreme Court, death penalty appeals are likely to be rejected. Federal crimes include murders where the perpetrator has acted in more than one state, but also crimes like treason and drug-smuggling.
“It’s perfectly possible that Trump could influence who will be put to death.” Meanwhile the rush to vacate more death row cells continues apace. Purkey, who was convicted of a gruesome kidnapping and killing in 2003, was due to be executed last night but was granted an injunction at the last minute. Honken, convicted of killing five people in 2004, is due to die on Friday. His team is appealing for a reprieve. But with Trump on the campaign trail, few believe they – and dozens of others – will escape death for long.
THE prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case will today demand to be freed from jail despite being convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman.
Christian Brueckner’s lawyers want the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg to overturn his seven-year sentence for attacking the American in Praia da Luz in 2005.
They claim it breached international law to try him for rape after he was extradited from Portugal over child abuse charges.
If judges rule in favour, they could ask Germany’s Federal Court of Justice to quash the conviction.
Phone data shows that Brueckner, 43, was in Praia da Luz in 2007 when Madeleine vanished days before her fourth birthday.