White Supremacist May be First Federal Execution in 17 Years

After nearly 2 decades of postponement, white supremacist Daniel Lewis Lee is scheduled to be executed on Monday. As reported in the Washington Free Beacon, this will be the first Federal execution in 17 years.  Should it proceed as planned, Lee’s execution will mark the culmination of continued efforts by Attorney General William Barr to restart the death penalty.

Lee is facing the death penalty for the 1996 murder of the Mueller family, including husband and wife William and Nancy Mueller, and their eight-year-old daughter, Sarah. Lee, and his accomplice Chevie Kehoe were members of a white supremacist group that envisioned the  a white ethnostate as the future of the US, supporting their cause with the proceeds of their killing spree. The duo suffocated William and Nancy before torturing and murdering their daughter, later dumping the bodies in a bayou and joking the family was now on a “liquid diet”.

Despite the severity of his crime, Lee has been on death row since his conviction in 1998, delaying his sentence with endless appeals. The delay can be attributed to opponents of the death-penalty, who have made a conscious effort to disrupt the practice through procedural disputes.

Efforts to delay the sentence continue, with the most recent objections surrounding the coronavirus. The family of Lee’s victims, who have publicly opposed his sentence, requested a stay on Tuesday, arguing that that pandemic makes traveling to see the execution dangerous.

The ACLU has also filed a stay request on behalf of the religious counsel, to one of the other men scheduled to be executed later this month. The ACLU argues that the pandemic would place the Buddhist priest at risk as he carried out his religious duties. The results of both appeals are presently unknown, but are expected to be revealed before Monday.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, argues that Lee should have exhausted his appeals years ago. “If you go through all the proceedings, you find several of them taking multiple years when they don’t need to. And you find too many times going back to the well on the same case. The denial of his federal collateral review was affirmed by the Court of Appeals in 2013. That plus the petition to the US Supreme Court to take the case should be the end of the case.”

But, Scheidegger said, capital defense lawyers continue to file technical motions to delay the sentence. “Delay and obstruction has become their whole strategy. They continue to file motion after motion after motion.” Even death penalty opponent Justice Stephen Breyers added that “the long delays that now typically occur between the time an offender is sentenced to death and his execution are ‘excessive.'”

The divide among both politicians and citizens alike makes Monday’s execution a particularly notable event, and underlying differences between president Trump, who supports the death penalty and groups like the ACLU, who oppose it.  While America has found an advocate for the death penalty during Trump’s presidency, just years ago, president Barack Obama worked against capital punishment. His administration did not seek or conduct a single execution, and he ended his term issuing two commutations for murderers on federal death row.

Joe Biden is going further, calling for abolition of the death penalty.  This means that Monday’s possible execution may become a new talking point among Americans, perhaps influencing November’s elections.