Last minute stays like the one issued this morning should be an extreme exception, “the Supreme Court said.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the first federal executions in 17 years could take place, quashing an injunction blocking them to allow legal challenges to the government’s lethal injection protocol to continue.
Justice Tanya Chutkan of the United States District Court in Washington on Monday ordered the Department of Justice to delay four executions scheduled for July and August.
Chutkan’s order was issued less than seven hours before Daniel Lee’s execution was scheduled to take place in Terre Haute, Indiana. The order was then confirmed by a US court of appeal.
“The complainants in this case have not demonstrated as required to justify a last minute intervention by a Federal Court. Last minute stays like the one issued this morning should be the extreme exception, not the norm,” said the Supreme Court.
“The government has produced its own testimony from competing experts, indicating that any pulmonary edema does not occur until after the death of the prisoner or his total insensitivity,” the court added.
Authorities were ready to proceed with the execution of Lee at 4:00 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT) on Tuesday after the Supreme Court ruling, documents filed by Washington attorneys for the court showed.
“Given the imminent and irreparable harm he faces, Lee respectfully requests the court to immediately rule on his further request and his motion for a preliminary injunction,” said his lawyers.
Reuters could not verify whether the execution took place at 4 a.m. EDT. The United States Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Attorney General William Barr announced in July that the Department of Justice would resume the executions of some of the 62 federal death row inmates.
He originally planned five executions for last December, but Chutkan ordered him to delay them while long-running trials challenging the government’s lethal injection protocol were under way.
An appeals court overturned the injunction in April, and Barr announced new execution dates for July and August for four inmates, all of whom are convicted of the murder of children: Lee, Wesley Purkey, Dustin Honken and Keith Nelson .
(Report by Jonathan Allen in New York and Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Edited by Michael Perry and Ed Osmond)
(This story has not been edited by GalacticGaming staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
