US Executes 1st Federal Prisoner in 17 years: Daniel Lewis Lee convicted for killing family, including 8 year old girl in 1996
Kehoe Brothers
The Muellers ATF
In 1996, William and Nancy Mueller and their 8-year old daughter Sarah were brutally murdered. Their handcuffed bodies were found in a lake. Agents later recovered a compatible handcuff key from Chevie Kehoe’s home.
Image of William and Nancy Mueller
The Crime and Investigation
Brothers Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe, their father, Kirby, and accomplices Daniel Lee and Faron Lovelace were devoted members of the Aryan Peoples’ Republic, a white supremacist organization. They spent the period between 1995 and 1997 engaged in criminal activities that promoted and funded the organization.
Their collective crimes, conducted across a five-state area, included multiple murders, kidnappings, firearms violations, robbery and violent shoot-outs with police, using a portion of the loot to purchase an Idaho property for a training base. In 1996, Chevie Kehoe and Daniel Lee robbed and viciously killed a Federal Firearms Licensee, William Mueller, and his family. Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies collaborated in a series of investigations culminating with the five suspect’s arrests.
The Arrest and Adjudication
Chevie and Cheyn Kehoe’s mother, in fear for her own life contacted ATF agents with invaluable information that helped lead to the arrests. She also was an important witness at the subsequential trial. All five defendants were convicted in state or federal courts. Kirby Kehoe pled guilty and received 44 months imprisonment. Cheyne Kehoe got a sentence of 24 years. Chevie Kehoe and Daniel Lee were both convicted of murder, with Kehoe getting life imprisonment and Lee the death penalty. Faron Lovelace was also convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
Arrest Image of Chevie Kehoe and Daniel Lee
The Debate, Opinion VOA News
The U.S. government has carried out its first execution in 17 years after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in an early Tuesday decision to dismiss a lower court’s injunction on three executions scheduled for this week and another set for next month.
Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death with a dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital at a federal prison in Indiana hours after the court released its ruling.
Lawyers for the four men argued that pentobarbital could cause a type of respiratory distress with the sensation of drowning or suffocating.
The Supreme Court majority rejected that argument, saying the drug has been adopted by individual states that carry out their own executions and that more than 100 people have been put to death that way “without incident.”
“The Government has produced competing expert testimony of its own, indicating that any pulmonary edema occurs only after the prisoner has died or been rendered fully insensate,” the majority wrote. “The plaintiffs in this case have not made the showing required to justify last-minute intervention by a Federal Court.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan, said in a dissenting opinion that the majority had accepted the government’s “artificial claim of urgency” and rushed the review process.
Justice Stephen Breyer, also joined by Ginsburg, suggested in his dissent that the court may need to examine the constitutionality of the death penalty itself.
The execution of Wesley Ira Purkey is scheduled for Wednesday, followed by the execution of Dustin Lee Honken on Friday.
Keith Dwayne Nelson is scheduled to be put to death August 28.
Before Tuesday, the federal government had executed three people since reinstating the death penalty in 1988, with the last happening in 2003.