The US government is planning to carry out the first federal execution in nearly two decades, despite the objections of the family of the victims and after a volley of legal proceedings surrounding risks caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Daniel Lewis Lee, of Yukon, Oklahoma, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 4pm on Monday at a federal prison in Indiana. He was convicted in Arkansas of the 1996 killings of William Mueller, a gun dealer, his wife, Nancy, and her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell.
The execution, the first of a federal death row inmate since 2003, comes after a federal appeals court lifted an injunction on Sunday that had been put in place last week after the victims’ family argued they would be put at high risk of coronavirus if they had to travel to attend the execution. The family had vowed to appeal to the supreme court.
The decision to proceed with the execution – and two others scheduled later in the week – during a global health pandemic that has killed more than 135,000 people and is ravaging prisons nationwide, drew scrutiny from civil rights groups and the family of Lee’s victims.
The decision has been criticised as a dangerous and political move. Critics argue the government is creating an unnecessary and manufactured urgency around a topic that is not high on the list of Americans’ concerns during the pandemic. It is also likely to revive the national conversation about criminal justice reform in the run-up to the 2020 elections.
Last week, the attorney general, William Barr, said the justice department had a duty to carry out sentences imposed by the courts and to bring a sense of closure to the victims and those in the communities where the killings took place.
However, relatives of those killed by Lee strongly oppose that view and wanted to be present at the execution to counter any contention that it 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,’” said Monica Veillette, a relative.
The family would be have to travel thousands of miles and witness the execution in a small room where social distancing is virtually impossible. The federal prison system has struggled in recent months to contain the exploding number of coronavirus cases behind bars.
There are four confirmed coronavirus cases among inmates at the Terre Haute prison, where the execution is due to be carried out.
“The federal government has put this family in the untenable position of choosing between their right to witness Danny Lee’s execution and their own health and safety,” the family’s attorney, Baker Kurrus, said.
Barr said he believed the Bureau of Prisons could carry out the executions without putting anyone at risk.
On Sunday, the justice department disclosed that a staff member involved in preparing for the execution had tested positive for coronavirus, but said he had not been in the execution chamber and had not come into contact with anyone on the specialised team sent to the prison to handle the execution.
The victim’s family have asked the justice department and Donald Trump not to go ahead with the execution.
The three men due to be executed this week had been scheduled to be put to death when Barr announced last year that the federal government would resume executions, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment. A fourth man is scheduled to be put to death in August.
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. Though there hasn’t been a federal execution since 2003, the justice department has continued to approve death penalty prosecutions and federal courts have sentenced defendants to death.
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 said last July the Obama-era review had been completed, clearing the way for executions to resume. He approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaces the three-drug combination previously used in federal executions with one drug, pentobarbital.
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