On July 14, 2020, for the first time in seventeen years, an inmate took his last breath on the bluish-grey gurney at United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute–home to the Federal death row and execution chamber. The same process would occur twice more that week. In the span of merely four days, the Federal Government doubled the number of people it has executed since reinstating capital punishment in 1988, putting Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, and Dustin Lee Honken to death by lethal injection on the 14th, 16th, and 17th of July respectively.
As with most notable events this year, the three executions attracted a great deal of controversy and even outrage. In The New York Times, lawyers Cate Stetson and Ruth Friedman denounced the executions as “shameful” and argued that the executions were part of a “reckless push to bring back the federal death penalty” on account of a lethal injection protocol that supposedly violated the Eighth Amendment. It was because of this protocol that District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan placed a preliminary injunction on all three executions. Others have criticized the executions for failing to represent victims’ interests, being inconsiderate to the family of Lee’s victims, who wished to see him spared, and creating unnecessary political controversy around a topic which was not at the forefront of national conversation.
A closer examination of these reservations reveals serious faults with all of them; the execution protocol utilized in the three executions was by no means untried. On the contrary, multiple states that impose capital sentences have utilized pentobarbital as their drug of choice for years without incident, including Texas, Georgia, and Missouri. Furthermore, the issue of execution protocol has already been considered, as Judge Chutkan issued an injunction which demanded examination of the protocol, an injunction which was lifted six months later in a per curiam decision by the D.C. Court of Appeals. Taking these facts into consideration, it can hardly be said that the Federal protocol either violated the Eighth Amendment, or was not given proper consideration.
It must also be noted that the three condemned were not rushed to their executions. Alongside the 17 year moratorium on Federal executions, Lee, Purkey and Honken spent 21, 17 and 14 years on death row respectively, enough time for all three to exhaust their appeals. Additionally, the father of Jennifer Long, one of Purkey’s victims, stated after the execution that it had “taken too long” to put him to death. Long was raped and murdered by Purkey, after which her remains were burned and thrown in a septic pond. The grisly acts for which Purkey was sentenced to death are of a similar nature to those of Lee and Honken. Lee was an accomplice to the torture and murder of a family of three in a plot to acquire weapons for a white separatist state, while Honken was sentenced to die for the murders of five people, including a six and ten year old girl, whom he feared would testify against him in a narcotics case. While the relatives of Lee’s victims wanted his sentence commuted, the families of the other two victims supported the executions. Evidently, it appears that the last minute attempts to delay the executions of the three men were more likely to have not been in the interest of the victims’ families - not the executions themselves as some people have claimed.
As for the supposedly political nature of the executions, it is undoubtedly true that capital punishment remains a contested issue. However, as it stands, the death penalty remains on the books as a legitimate punishment that can be handed down by the Federal Government. And, as a legitimate punishment, it is the obligation of the state to take all necessary measures to ensure that it is carried out. Upon issuing the death warrants for the three condemned, Attorney General William Barr stated that the American people “have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death” and that the Federal Government has a duty to “to carry forward the sentence imposed.” Regardless of where individuals may stand on the issue of capital punishment, it must be concluded that the three Federal executions were carried out in a manner that was both consistent with the rule of law, the nature of the crimes committed by the offenders, the wishes of the American people and family of the victims, and with the Constitution.