‘You’re killing innocent man’ says inmate as execution goes ahead

The US government carried out the first federal execution in almost two decades yesterday, putting to death a man who killed an Arkansas family in a 1990s plot to build a whites-only nation.

Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, of Yukon, Oklahoma, died by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

“I didn’t do it,” Lee said just before he was executed. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer. ... You’re killing an innocent man.”

The decision to move forward with the execution - the first by the Bureau of Prisons since 2003 - drew scrutiny from civil rights groups and the relatives of Lee’s victims, who had sued to try to halt it, citing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.

The execution took place after a series of legal volleys that ended when the Supreme

Court stepped in early Tuesday in a 5-4 ruling and allowed it to move forward.

Attorney General William Barr has said the Justice Department has a duty to carry out the sentences imposed by the courts, including the death penalty, and to bring a sense of closure to the victims and those in the communities where the killings happened.

Butrelativesofthosekilledby Lee in 1996 strongly opposed that idea and long argued that Lee deserved a sentence of life in prison. They wanted to be present to counter any contention that the execution was being done on their behalf.

“For us it is a matter of being there and saying, ‘This is not being done in our name; we do not want this,”’ relative Monica Veillette said.

Lee’s co-defendant Chevie Kehoe, received a life sentence.

Kehoe, of Colville, Washington, recruited Lee in 1995 to join his white supremacist organisation, known as the Aryan Peoples’ Republic. Two years later, they were arrested for the killings of gun dealer William Mueller, his wife, Nancy, and her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell, in Tilly, Arkansas, about 75 miles northwest of Little Rock.

Two other federal executions are scheduled for later this week, though one is on hold in a separate legal claim.

Executions on the federal level have been rare, and the government has put to death only three defendants since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988.

In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, President Barack Obama directed the Justice Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs.

The attorney general last July approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaces the three-drug combination previously used with one drug, pentobarbital.