WASHINGTON: A US judge ordered a delay on Monday of the first federal execution in the United States in 17 years - the death by lethal injection of a former white supremacist scheduled to be carried out later in the day.
Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, of Yukon, Oklahoma, and another man were convicted of murdering a family of three in 1996 during a robbery intended to help fund the founding of an "Aryan Peoples Republic."
Lee was scheduled to be executed at 4:00 pm (2000 GMT) at Terre Haute prison in the midwestern state of Indiana, the first of three federal inmates whose executions were to take place this week.
But US District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the executions halted to allow for legal challenges to the lethal injection that was to be used. Chutkan said the use of a single drug, pentobarbital, to carry out the executions could cause "extreme pain and needless suffering" and may violate a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
"The public is not served by short-circuiting legitimate judicial process," the judge said. The Justice Department immediately appealed the judge's order to a higher court and the Supreme Court may eventually have the final say.
Lee would be the first federal inmate to be executed in the United States since 2003 and the first since President Donald Trump announced plans to resume federal executions. There have been just three federal executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1988.
Lee and another man, Chevie Kehoe, were convicted in Arkansas in 1999 of the 1996 murders of William Mueller, a gun dealer, his wife, Nancy, and her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell. According to prosecutors, the pair robbed Mueller to steal guns that they planned to sell to finance the founding of a white supremacist "Aryan Peoples Republic" in the Pacific Northwest.
Lee, who has since renounced his white supremacist beliefs according to his lawyers, was sentenced to death while Kehoe received three life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Earlene Peterson, 81, whose daughter and granddaughter were killed, has campaigned against Lee's death sentence, saying she wants him to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
"It's an easy way out," Peterson told The New York Times. "He should have to live through this. Like I did." Peterson and relatives of other victims also filed a lawsuit seeking to delay the execution, arguing that it was dangerous for them to travel to Terre Haute to witness Lee's execution because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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