White supremacist Daniel Lewis Lee to be executed on July 13 for killing Arkansas family, including 8-year-old girl
WASHINGTON, D.C.: The execution date for Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, who slaughtered an entire Arkansas family in 1996, has finally been set for next month, July 13. 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.
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 Mueller, 53, a gunsmith with 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. The pair 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.
Lee's attorney, Ruth Friedman, in a statement to Arkansas Online on June 15, said that the trial judge and lead prosecutor's revised opinion was "an unprecedented occurrence" in a capital murder case. "The government has portrayed Mr. Lee as a white supremacist and a child-killer," Friedman said. "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."
Nancy's mother, Earlene Peterson, also opposes Lee's execution due to her religious convictions. She had also appealed to President Donald Trump to grant clemency to Lee despite him killing his daughter and her family. "I can't see how executing Daniel Lee will honor my daughter in any way," Peterson had said in a video posted online. "In fact, kind of like it dirties her name because she wouldn't want it and I don't want it."
US Attorney General William P. Barr, in a press released on Monday, had stated: "The American people, acting through Congress and Presidents of both political parties, have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death. We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system."