A federal judge in Indiana on Friday halted the execution of a man convicted in the 1996 slaying of a rural Arkansas family, but that ruling was promptly followed by the promise of an emergency appeal from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, was scheduled to die Monday. If the government's appeal is successful, he would be the first federal death row inmate executed in 17 years.
The ruling came just hours after a federal judge in Little Rock denied two last-minute requests by Lee to stop his execution.
The Indiana judge granted the request for a delay filed by the victims' family members. They had argued that they would be putting their health and safety at risk by traveling hundreds of miles to a federal penitentiary during the covid-19 pandemic, which has led to the deaths of more than 130,000 Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Lee and his accomplice, Chevie Kehoe, murdered William Mueller, 52; his wife, Nancy, 28; and her daughter, 8-year-old Sarah Powell, in the family's Tilly-area home in January 1996. The victims were asphyxiated and dumped into a bayou outside Russellville.
The victims' family members -- Earlene Branch Peterson, 81, Nancy's mother and Sarah's grandmother; Kimma Gurel, 61, Nancy's sister and Sarah's aunt; and Monica Veillette, 43, Nancy's niece and Sarah's cousin -- filed their motion Tuesday in U.S. District Court, Southern District of Indiana. In the filing, they stated that the U.S. government was forcing them to make a dangerous choice.
"[My clients] are grateful to the court for this ruling, which will enable them to exercise their right to attend the execution in the future while protecting themselves against the ravages of COVID-19," said Little Rock attorney Baker Kurrus, who filed the motion on the family's behalf.
He also said he was "hopeful" that the federal government wouldn't appeal the ruling.
"A reversal [of the judge's ruling] would put them [the family members] back in the untenable position of choosing between attending the execution at great risk to their health and safety, or forgoing this event they have long wanted to be present for," Kurrus wrote.
It took an hour for the Justice Department to file its notice of appeal to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, according to The Associated Press. The government also filed court papers requesting that the judge stay the order, pending the appeal.
Veillette, who lives in Spokane, Wash., did not return a message seeking comment Friday. In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last month, she said she dreaded the thought of flying to Indiana for the execution, but she was especially afraid for her ailing grandmother, who had planned to travel 550 miles by car from her home in Hector in Pope County.
"There is so much stress and concern," Veillette said at the time. "Is it even possible to socially distance inside a waiting room? Absolutely not. How are we going to be safe?"
Veillette was worried enough to call an official with the federal Bureau of Prisons about social distancing measures at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., where Lee was to be put to death. Details from that conversation were included in the motion that she, her mother and grandmother filed this week.
In her decision, Chief District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson referred to Veillette's conversation with the prison official, who told her "it would be impossible to maintain" social distancing for the witnesses while they rode in transport vans and sat in waiting rooms.
Lee and Kehoe were tried together in 1999. Jurors took 11 hours to convict them on all counts of murder, racketeering and conspiracy. Prosecutors said Kehoe was the leader of the Aryan Peoples Republic, a white-supremacist group, and he wanted to steal from Bob Mueller because he could use his cash and weapons to launch a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest.
Kehoe and Lee broke into the family's home dressed as federal agents and waited in the dark for them to return home from a gun show. They ambushed the family in the house and murdered them. Kehoe killed the girl after Lee refused, according to court testimony.
Jurors recommended a life sentence for Kehoe but recommended death for Lee. That was based partly on Lee's involvement in a grisly murder in Oklahoma when he was 17. Jurors said they thought Lee posed a greater immediate danger compared with Kehoe.
On June 15, Attorney General William Barr announced that he was resuming capital punishment and scheduled the executions of four federal prison inmates convicted in the slayings of children. Lee was scheduled to go first.
On June 29, after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the executions, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., issued a statement.
"Daniel Lewis Lee is a white supremacist responsible for slaying an entire family in Arkansas, including a young girl," Cotton wrote. "Twenty years after a jury imposed the death penalty for these crimes, the Supreme Court has rightly allowed justice to proceed."
The decision to execute Lee has been questioned by numerous people. Peterson last year asked President Donald Trump, whom she supports, to grant clemency to Lee in interviews with CNN and The New York Times.
Veillette also is opposed to Lee's execution, adding that she wanted it off the table 21 years ago after jurors decided on a life sentence recommendation for Kehoe. Regardless, she and other family members felt they had a moral obligation to be there, she said. The covid-19 pandemic tested that.
The judge also highlighted in her ruling that the government's pursuit of Lee's execution is supposedly "intertwined with" the victims' family's "interest in timely justice." The plaintiff's motion contradicted that claim.
Peterson, Gurel and Veillette "have expressed a greater interest in safely attending the execution than in having the execution proceed on the government's timetable," Magnus-Stinson wrote.
The judge's ruling applies only to Lee. The executions of the other three inmates remain scheduled. Two are set for next week and the other for late August. Their crimes occurred in Missouri and Iowa.
The Associated Press reported Friday that the Justice Department is confident in its appeal.
Earlier Friday, saying "no more delay is warranted," a federal judge in Little Rock denied two last-minute requests to stop Lee's execution.
One of those requests also centered on the pandemic, while the other cited what Lee's attorneys said was a lack of proper notice about the execution.
U.S. District Judge Lee Rudofsky said the Justice Department's June 15 notice of the July 13 execution date and the events leading up to it were lawful, and he wouldn't void them.
Rudofsky also said that while he is "very sympathetic to the concerns regarding the Covid-19 crisis and all the possible effects it could have on this situation," it is uncertain when the pandemic will end, and Congress hasn't suspended any executions as a result of it.
"Whether the need for finality outweighs the mitigated but real Covid-19 related concerns is a judgment I prefer to leave to the elected branches of government," wrote Rudofsky, who took over the case Monday when U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker recused herself, saying she had just discovered she was part of a team of attorneys who intervened in Lee's case in 1999 to seek access to records.
Rudofsky noted that the department and the Bureau of Prisons "believes it is worth moving ahead," but "I am not in good conscience going to substitute my weighing of the advantages and disadvantage for theirs -- especially when a delay would have to be a long one to do any good."
Lee had cited concerns about being able to meet with his attorneys before the execution and whether they would be able to attend the execution because of the pandemic.
Rudofsky said, "Mr. Lee has been in litigation for the better part of the last 17 years. There will always be more litigation to file. At some point, the execution must come -- at least if the death penalty is to actually provide any of the penal benefits its proponents think it does."
