Credit: Wikipedia Commons /   The lethal injection room at San Quentin State Prison, CA. completed in 2010. 

By Gary Raynaldo        DIPLOMATIC TIMES

Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, a convicted killer, was executed by lethal injection early Tuesday morning after an overnight conservative majority ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way.  It was the first federal execution in 17 years  as the Supreme Court issued what many legal observers characterized as a “unprecedented opinion” at 2 am.  Lee was pronounced dead by the coroner at 8:07 a.m. ET in Terre Haute, Indiana.  His last words were “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man,” according to a pool report.  Lee, a one-time white supremacist, killed a family of three including an 8-year-old girl.  Lee blamed a judge in Arkansas for ignoring DNA evidence in his case and said he was on the other side of the country when the killings happened.  He was scheduled to be executed Monday but a  federal judge blocked the planned execution of Lee, and three others, citing ongoing challenges to the federal government’s lethal injection protocol. 

In the Supreme Court ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded Lee and other men on death row had virtually no chance of succeeding in their claim that pentobarbital injections amounted to cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment.  Dissenting,  Justice Sonia Sotomayor denounced the rush to execute Lee, rather than build a fuller record in the lower courts.

 ‘The execution of Daniel Lewis Lee was about politics, not justice ‘ :  LA Times Editorial 

“There was no good reason for the federal government to rush the execution Tuesday morning of Daniel Lewis Lee. No good reason, that is, other than politics. This execution has taken place because the Trump administration is driven to display its law-and-order toughness (except, of course, when it comes to President Trump’s cronies) as it confronts significant reelection headwinds. But that move also spotlights some of the reasons the death penalty should be done away with.”

-LA  Times 

U.S. Attorney General William Barr issued a statement later on Tuesday after Lee’s execution:

“Today, Lee finally faced the justice he deserved. The American people have made the considered choice to permit capital punishment for the most egregious federal crimes, and justice was done today in implementing the sentence for Lee’s horrific offenses.”

The Supreme Court even refused to consider a claim by Earlene Peterson, 81, a relative of Lee’s victims, who had asked the Bureau of Prisons to delay the execution, citing the coronavirus pandemic. She and other family members had appealed to Attorney General Barr and President Trump to commute Lee’s sentence to life in prison.