First US Federal Execution by Lethal Injection Since 2003 Carried Out Today

The US Federal Government carries out it`s first execution for 17 years. image credit: Wikipedia

Federal executions in the US are actually rare and only three have been carried out since 1988.

Daniel Lewis Lee, a white supremacist, has been killed by lethal injection in the first US federal execution for nearly two decades, with the last execution being 17 years ago.

The Grim Details

Lee, tortured and murdered a couple and their eight-year-old daughter and dumped them in water, he paid the ultimate price at 8:07 a.m this morning and was executed at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

“I didn’t do it,” he said just before he was killed.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer- you’re killing an innocent man.”

Lee’s execution was initially postponed by a district court on Monday over a legal challenge against a new injection protocol, but in the early hours, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that it could go ahead, interestingly pushed through with the help of the Trump administration. Distancing them from the execution, relatives of those killed by Lee in 1996 had wanted him to get a life sentence and said the execution wasn’t being done in their name.

Who was Daniel Day-Lewis?

Daniel Lewis Lee was an American white supremacist and convicted murderer who was sentenced to death and executed for the 1996 murders of William Frederick Mueller, Nancy Ann Mueller, and their daughter Sarah Elizabeth Powell. Lee and his accomplice, Chevie Kehoe, who received a life sentence, murdered the Muellers at their family home in Arkansas, on January 11, 1996. Federal officials executed Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, who was convicted in 1999 of killing a family of three, at a penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.

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Tony Winterburn

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