Washington
A US appeals court has issued a ruling that would allow for the first federal execution in 17 years on Monday, pending a last-minute application to the Supreme Court.
President Donald Trump’s administration has scheduled three more executions in the coming months, saying it is acting in the interest of crime victims.
Daniel Lee, a 47-year-old white supremacist, was convicted in 1999 of killing a gun dealer, his wife and her eight-year-old daughter in Arkansas. He is scheduled to die Monday by lethal injection at Indiana’s Terre Haute prison.
Relatives of his victims, including Earlene Peterson, the grandmother of Lee’s youngest victim, have asked for the execution to be delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic. But a temporary injunction by the Southern District of Indiana district court was lifted by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Sunday, clearing the way for the execution to go ahead.
The victims’ family will take their appeal “to the US Supreme Court in an effort to seek reversal,” their lawyer Baker Kurrus said in a statement Sunday. They hope to delay the execution until travel to the prison is safe, he said.
“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,” Kurrus said. It comes as the Bureau of Prisons said Sunday a member of Terre Haute prison staff had tested positive for the virus.
Most offences in the US are tried at the state level but the federal government takes up the most serious cases, such as terror attacks or racist crimes. The last execution at federal level was in 2003.—APP
