A federal judge has temporarily halted four executions - the first of which was scheduled for Dec. 9 in Terre Haute.
Now, the executions of all five men who were scheduled to be executed at the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary have been temporarily delayed.
In an order filed Wednesday evening, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan granted motions for preliminary injunction filed by Alfred Bourgeois, Dustin Lee Honken, Daniel Lewis Lee, and Wesley Ira Purkey.
A panel of judges had already issued a stay in the case of the fifth man, Lezmond Mitchell.
Chutkan said in the ruling that the public is not served by “short-circuiting” legitimate judicial process.
“It is greatly served by attempting to ensure that the most serious punishment is imposed lawfully,” she wrote.
Attorney General William Barrunexpectedly announced in Julythat the government would begin resuming executions, ending an informal moratorium on federal capital punishment as the issue receded from the public domain.
The first inmate scheduled to be executed — on Dec. 9 — is Danny Lee, who was convicted of killing a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl, in 1996, and stealing guns and cash in a plot to establish a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest.
The others include Lezmond Mitchell, who prosecutors say stabbed a 63-year-old grandmother to death and then forced her 9-year-old granddaughter to sit beside her grandmother's lifeless body as he drove about 40 miles, before slitting the girl's throat. Their beheaded, mutilated bodies were found in a shallow grave on a Native reservation.
He was scheduled to be executed two days after Lee and requested that his execution be stayed in September. That request was granted in October by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The Bureau of Prisons planned to execute Wesley Ira Purkey on Dec. 13. He was convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl before dismembering, burning and then dumping the teen's body in a septic pond. Prosecutors said he was also convicted in a state court in Kansas after using a claw hammer to kill an 80-year-old woman who suffered from polio.
Prosecutors say another one of the inmates, Alfred Bourgeois, tortured, molested and then beat his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter to death.
The final inmate who was scheduled to be executed, Dustin Lee Honken, was convicted in 2004 in connection with the killings of five people as part of a plan to thwart a federal investigation into his drug operation. They included two men who became informants and were going to testify against him, the girlfriend of one of the informants and her two young daughters.
Most Democrats oppose the death penalty. By contrast, President Donald Trump has spoken often about capital punishment and his belief that executions serve as an effective deterrent and an appropriate punishment for some crimes, including mass shootings and the killings of police officers.
Still, executions on the federal level have long been rare. The government has put to death only three defendants since restoring the federal death penalty in 1988, the most recent of which occurred in 2003, whenLouis Joneswas executed for the 1995 kidnapping, rape and murder of a young female soldier.
In 2014, following abotched state execution in Oklahoma, President Barack Obama directed the Justice Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs.
Barr said in July that the Obama-era review had been completed, clearing the way for executions to resume.
He approved a new procedure for lethal injections that replaces the three drugs previously used in federal execution with one drug, pentobarbital. This is similar to the procedure used in several states, including Georgia, Missouri and Texas.
Some of the chosen convicts challenged the new procedures in court, arguing that the government was circumventing proper methods in order to wrongly execute inmates quickly.
Danny Lee, of Yukon, Oklahoma,was the first person scheduled to be executed.He was convicted in the 1996 deaths of an Arkansas family as part of a plot to set up a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest.
“This decision prevents the government from evading accountability and making an end-run around the courts by attempting to execute prisoners under a protocol that has never been authorized by Congress,” said the convicts’ attorney, Shawn Nolan. “The court has made clear that no execution should go forward while there are still so many unanswered questions about the government’s newly announced execution method.”
The death penalty remains legal in 30 states, but only a handful regularly conduct executions. Texas has executed 108 prisoners since 2010, far more than any other state.
Though there hasn't been a federal execution since 2003, the Justice Department has continued to approve death penalty prosecutions and federal courts have sentenced defendants to death.
