US Federal Government Resumes Executions After 17 Years

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...and, predictably enough, it has come with a massive dose of controversy.



The U.S. federal government ended its 17-year hiatus between executions on July 14, 2020, putting Daniel Lewis Lee (pictured) to death moments after overnight rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated prior court orders that had placed the execution on hold. Two more executions are scheduled this week, with a fourth set for August.

Although Lee’s death warrant expired at midnight on July 13, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) attempted to start his execution at 4:00 a.m. on the 14th, after the U.S. Supreme Court had vacated a preliminary injunction entered by a federal district court in Washington, D.C. Notified by defense counsel that a stay of execution was still in effect from an Arkansas federal court ruling in December 2019, the BOP left Lee strapped to the execution gurney for four hours while federal prosecutors filed motions in the Eighth Circuit to terminate the stay. The appeals court lifted the stay at 6:36 a.m. Central time, 7:36 a.m. in the execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana. Federal law requires the Bureau of Prisons to set a new execution date if a stay of execution is lifted after a prior death warrant expires. But without notifying defense counsel, the BOP commenced the execution, injecting Lee with a fatal dose of the drug pentobarbital. He was pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m. Eastern.

The Bureau of Prisons released a one-page document it said had provided Lee with the required legal notice of his new execution date, though he was provided no opportunity to speak with counsel or contest the BOP’s adherence to required protocols before he was executed. “The federal government just executed a prisoner in violation of the law,” DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham said. “And if their actions could be construed as complying with federal regulations, the regulations were unconstitutional.”

According to a statement by Lee’s attorney, Ruth Friedman, Lee was executed with multiple motions in his case still pending, and without notice to his attorneys. Friedman wrote, “It is shameful that the government saw fit to carry out this execution during a pandemic. It is shameful that the government saw fit to carry out this execution when counsel for Danny Lee could not be present with him, and when the judges in his case and even the family of his victims urged against it. And it is beyond shameful that the government, in the end, carried out this execution in haste, in the middle of the night, while the country was sleeping. We hope that upon awakening, the country will be as outraged as we are.”

Lee had been scheduled for execution on July 13, with the authorization to put him to death expiring at midnight. Early in the day, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. had issued a preliminary injunction barring all four executions on the grounds that the prisoners were likely to prevail on their challenge to the constitutionality of the execution protocol. Federal prosecutors filed simultaneous motions in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the United States Supreme Court seeking to vacate the injunction. As the midnight deadline approached, the appeals court denied the motion, and set an expedited briefing schedule to consider the merits of the district court’s ruling. That schedule, however, extended beyond July 17, effectively halting the first three scheduled executions.

Hours later, around 2:30 am on July 14, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the district court injunction by a 5-4 vote. In an unsigned opinion, the five conservative justices wrote that last-minute stay applications were disfavored and that the prisoners had not met the “exceedingly high bar” of establishing that they could show that executions using pentobarbital constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, dissented from the decision, writing that “hastily” denying the prisoners’ challenge “accepts the Government’s artificial claim of urgency to truncate ordinary procedures of judicial review” and “sets a dangerous precedent.” She continued, “the grant of the Government’s emergency application inflicts the most irreparable of harms without the deliberation such an action warrants.” Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ginsburg, renewed his call for an examination of the constitutionality of the death penalty. He wrote, “the resumption of federal executions promises to provide examples that illustrate the difficulties of administering the death penalty consistent with the Constitution. As I have previously written, the solution may be for this Court to directly examine the question whether the death penalty violates the Constitution.”

Immediately after the Court’s decision was issued, the Department of Justice (DOJ) began calling execution witnesses back to the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the execution was set to take place. Witnesses were told that the execution would take place at 4 am. Lee’s attorneys responded with a letter informing the Bureau of Prisons that a mandate from the District Court of the Eastern District of Arkansas, lifting an earlier stay in the case, had not yet issued, meaning that the execution was still legally stayed. At 7:36 am Eastern time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in response to an emergency motion filed by the DOJ, granted an expedited mandate allowing the execution to proceed. Thirty-one minutes later, Daniel Lee was declared dead.

So in short, the guy's death warrant had expired, the court lifted an order blocking the execution about six hours after the warrant had expired. They had strapped him to the gurney apparently unaware that this order was still in affect at the time; they then left him strapped while to-ing and fro-ing occurred in the background. The order was then lifted and he was executed, but this seems to have been in violation of a federal law that requires a new death warrant to be issued if a stay is lifted after the expiry of the previous death warrant.

Now, this bloke seems to have been a right scumbag, however....what a complete cluster*. How does that happen?
 
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Now, this bloke seems to have been a right scumbag, however....what a complete clusterfu**. How does that happen?
" Lee was executed with multiple motions in his case still pending, and without notice to his attorneys. "

My guess is they wanted to make a political statement to show the US fed gov is tough on crime. Lawyers and politicians wanting a "win" to show their people.
 
" Lee was executed with multiple motions in his case still pending, and without notice to his attorneys. "

My guess is they wanted to make a political statement to show the US fed gov is tough on crime. Lawyers and politicians wanting a "win" to show their people.
Yes, very likely they're the reasons. It's shameful though. Just disregarding their own laws like they're cheap inconveniences is terrible at the best of times, when it involves ending someone's life it's even more sinister.
 

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Poor mass murderer :(
I made an explicit point of mentioning that he was clearly a scumbag and that his character was not the point of the thread, it was clearly about the farcical nature of the proceedings leading up to the execution.

But well done on fudging the point as usual.
 
Apart from some people feeling a bit better about themselves for the death of another, what does this achieve, would any proponents of state sponsored murder wish to make a case for it? It's a hideously expensive thing to put all the way through the courts and it doesn't act as a deterrent, it seems utterly wasteful to me.
 
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Powerful article by Steve Earle on the death penalty.

 
Jul 12, 2020
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Careful, if that strawman you're building was any bigger there wouldn't be any hay left in the world.
It’s a reasonable question addressed in the 2012 N+1 essay by Christopher Glazek and pertinent to current politics.

 

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If you abolish prisons and police as advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement, how do you deal with people like this?
Straw man. Nobody is saying police and prisons should be abolished.


It means you take money allocated to the police and give it to other programs like mental health and so on. Some high up in the police in parts of the US have asked for fewer responsibilities and want some aspects to be given to specialist organisations and services.

One police force actually fired all of their police officers and had them reapply for their jobs. I believe it was very successful.

Nobody who matters is saying police and prisons should be abolished.
 
Jul 12, 2020
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Straw man. Nobody is saying police and prisons should be abolished.


It means you take money allocated to the police and give it to other programs like mental health and so on. Some high up in the police in parts of the US have asked for fewer responsibilities and want some aspects to be given to specialist organisations and services.

One police force actually fired all of their police officers and had them reapply for their jobs. I believe it was very successful.

Nobody who matters is saying police and prisons should be abolished.
It was an Op Ed in the New York Times a month ago.

 
It was an Op Ed in the New York Times a month ago.

Point taken, but is that written by "the Black Lives Matter movement"? The article doesn't say that you do it today, with no plan, but it does talk about how you "deal with people like this".


"The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.” "

- Again, this is about moving responsibilities away from the police.

"here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.
...
Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.

But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place."

- So maybe read past the headline? "Make them obsolete": a long term aim to make policing AS WE KNOW IT TODAY obsolete.

I don't think it will happen, but it's a good thing to aim for better alignment of community needs with service provision and the training of service providers.
 
Yes, did you?

Yes.

Do you understand how the police force is policed in America? Do you understand what corruption is?

The article discusses reducing the need for police to have contact with the community and that is done by solving the CORE ISSUES.

The answer isnt to throw more money at the police so they can be bigger, badder and stronger to keep all those bad criminals in place. The answer is to find out WHY PEOPLE TURN TO CRIME and start finding ways to STOP that behavior at its source.
 

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Apart from some people feeling a bit better about themselves for the death of another, what does this achieve, would any proponents of state sponsored murder wish to make a case for it? It's a hideously expensive thing to put all the way through the courts and it doesn't act as a deterrent, it seems utterly wasteful to me.
1) Plenty of examples of killers exactly like this getting parole many years down the track only to offend again. 2) It costs a fortune to keep air wasters like this in prison. 3) It's a deterent. 4) I confess I do like the thought that these people might experience the fear of the same fate they gave their victims. 5) leaving them in prison is at risk of these people being "humanised" by others.
 
Its entirely the point.

Not for me

I don't care if it's the Port Arthur killer, we shouldn't be in the business of state sanctioned death.

The bar is always set at "only those we are really really sure", but far too many innocent people get executed due to the human frailties of our legal system.

You can release a wrongfully convicted person and give them some kind of compo. If they are dead you can't undo that wrong.

As such, even if it means saving 1 innocent person from wrongful execution, we shouldn't do it - even if they are scum
 
Its entirely the point.
No it's not, even slightly. Scumbag or not, a basic legal process should be followed. It wasn't.

I am entirely unsurprised that you see this in such black and white terms though, it's all you're capable of.
 

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