Trump to appeal judge's delay of Daniel Lewis Lee's execution as victims' family won't travel amid pandemic
President Donald Trump's administration reportedly plans to appeal a judge's ruling that halted its Justice Department's first federal execution in 17 years after the victim's family members said they would not be able to attend it due to the coronavirus pandemic. The execution date for Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, who slaughtered an entire Arkansas family in 1996, was set for July 13 by the Justice Department last month. The new dates of at least four executions starting mid-July were announced by the federal agency on June 15.
Just three days before Lee’s scheduled execution, the district court for the Southern District of Indiana granted a temporary injunction at the request of close family members of the victims who did not want to travel across the country amid the pandemic. The Justice Department, however, filed its notice to appeal to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday, July 10.
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.
President Trump's supporter, Earlene Peterson, whose daughter and granddaughter was brutally murdered by Lee, last month, had 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."
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.
"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.