US government carries out first Federal execution in 17 years

Hours after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute legal-challenge on a 5-4 vote, the Justice Department put a 47-year-old man to death for his role in the 1996 murder of a family of three, the first federal execution in more than 17 years.

The death row prisoner, Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, a former white supremacist who has denounced his ties to that movement, was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, the Bureau of Prisons said. He is the first of three federal death row inmates scheduled for execution this week.

Lee’s death concluded an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment.

The Justice Department announced its intention last summer to resume the federal death penalty and to employ a new procedure to carry it out — using a single drug, pentobarbital — after several botched executions by lethal injection renewed scrutiny of capital punishment.

But up until the final hours before Lee’s death, the government had to fight off legal challenges both to the single-drug technique and to complications of carrying out the death penalty in the midst of a pandemic.

On Monday, a federal judge had delayed the execution, saying that questions about the constitutionality of the lethal injection procedure had not been fully litigated.

The Supreme Court’s unsigned 5-4 ruling early Tuesday morning said pentobarbital has been used in over 100 executions “without incident” and had been upheld by the Supreme Court and appeals courts.

The court said it was its responsibility “to ensure that method-of-execution challenges to lawfully issued sentences are resolved fairly and expeditiously,” so that “the question of capital punishment” can remain with “the people and their representatives, not the courts, to resolve.”

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, repeated their long-standing doubts about the constitutionality of the death penalty.

In a second dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan, said the court had acted with dangerous haste.

“Today’s decision illustrates just how grave the consequences of such accelerated decision-making can be,” Sotomayor wrote. “The court forever deprives respondents of their ability to press a constitutional challenge to their lethal injections, and prevents lower courts from reviewing that challenge.”