Danny Lee execution: Pro-Trump mother of victim urges prez to pardon daughter and granddaughter's killer
President Donald Trump's supporter, Earlene Peterson, whose daughter and granddaughter were brutally murdered by white supremacist Daniel Lewis Lee has asked the president to not execute him. Peterson, in a statement to MEA WorldWide (MEAWW), said that Lee's execution — set for July 13, 2020 — would "bring my family more pain."
Lee, 46, from Oklahoma, was given the death penalty after he, along with an accomplice Chevie Kehoe, plotted to steal guns and money in an attempt to fund a white-only ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest. The pair entered the Muller family house in Pope County on January 13, 1996, and robbed and murdered William Muller, 53, a gunsmith who had cash and weapons in his house. The duo also killed Mueller's wife Nancy, 28, and their eight-year-old daughter Sarah. The family was reportedly found weighed down with rocks and tossed in an Arkansas bayou. An autopsy found that the slaughtered family had been shot with a shotgun, bound, suffocated with plastic bags over their heads which were secured with duct tape.
Lee will be the first prisoner to be executed after 17 years by the Justice Department, ever since the practice was halted after 2003. The new dates of at least four executions starting mid-July were announced by the federal agency on June 15, Monday.
Peterson, in her plea to President Trump, said: "We don’t want Danny Lee to be executed. We feel Mr Lee’s execution would dishonor the memory of my daughter Nancy Ann and my granddaughter Sarah Elizabeth, who was killed when she was only eight years old. The man who actually killed my granddaughter — when Danny Lee refused to do so — has been sentenced to life, not death, and that’s what we think Mr Lee deserves, too." The grandmother was referring to Kehoe, who instead received a life imprisonment sentence.
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"The attorney general has said the government owes it to the victims and their families to carry out federal executions like Mr Lee’s. Please take our family’s feelings into consideration and grant clemency to Mr Lee. Thank you and God Bless You," Peterson added.
Kehoe and Lee were arrested separately nearly a year after the murders in September 1997. However, they were tried together. During the trial, the jury decided that Kehoe, who was described as the mastermind of the crime, should be given a life sentence without parole. Arkansas prosecutors at the time had decided to argue for the same sentence for Lee. However, the Justice Department officials in Washington overruled their decision and directed them to seek the death penalty for Lee. He was sentenced to death in 1999.
Nancy Mueller's brother, Paul Branch, felt the trial was unfair and told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at the time that Kehoe was the one who most deserved the death penalty. The trial judge and the lead prosecutor in the case, years after Lee's death penalty, went public with their opinion stating that Lee's death sentence should be overturned.
Meanwhile, Lee's attorney, Ruth Friedman, the director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project told MEAWW that the victim's family, the trial judge, and the lead prosecutor in his client's case have all opposed a death penalty.
"In what may be an unprecedented occurrence in a capital case, the trial judge, the lead prosecutor, and the victims’ family all oppose executing Danny Lee and believe a life sentence is appropriate," Friedman said. "The government has portrayed Mr Lee as a white supremacist and a child-killer. Neither is true. He has long since renounced the skinhead groups he joined as a youth, and the government has now dramatically re-characterized its case against Mr Lee; in fact, its own evidence at the trial was that he did not murder the child victim. Mr Lee’s indisputably more-culpable co-defendant received a life sentence, in large part because the government relied on junk science and false evidence to secure both Mr Lee’s conviction and his death sentence."
“Moreover, two federal judges, both appointed by Republican presidents, found on two different grounds that Danny Lee’s death sentence was unfairly obtained and should be invalidated, but procedural obstacles prevented both from granting relief," the attorney added. "Mr Lee is still trying to get a court to give substantive consideration to the problems in his case. Given all of these circumstances, it would be unconscionable for the government to execute Danny Lee.”