The American Supreme Court authorized, Tuesday, July 14, the resumption of federal executions in the United States, after seventeen years of interruption. She had invalidated the suspension of four executions decided the day before by a Washington court.

The first execution took place the same day. Daniel Lee, a white supremacist sentenced to death for a triple murder, died at 8:07 a.m. (12:07 a.m.) from a lethal injection at Terre Haute prison in Indiana. He was to be executed on Monday, but last-minute legal remedies delayed the proceedings. 

"You are killing an innocent man," he said before he died, according to an Indianapolis Star reporter who attended the execution. This 47-year-old man was sentenced to death in 1999 for the murder of a couple and their 8-year-old daughter in Arkansas, in a robbery intended to finance a supremacist group.

An appeal refused

Convicts say the execution protocol, a lethal dose of pentobarbital, would cause them "irreparable" suffering in violation of the Constitution, an argument often used by opponents of the death penalty. The mother of two victims, Earlene Peterson, 81, also wanted to appeal to the Supreme Court on Monday with other family members to obtain the postponement of the execution of Daniel Lee, because of the coronavirus pandemic, but the Court refused.

"The execution of Danny Lee for the murder of my daughter and granddaughter is not what I want and will bring more pain to my family," she said. She demanded that the death penalty be commuted to life imprisonment, which was given to a second man who played a central role in the murders.

It is "irresponsible to want to carry out so many executions in such a short time" in this context of health crisis, also explained Robert Dunham, director of the Information Center on the Death Penalty (DPIC), which refers to the subject. He denounced a "political instrumentalization of capital punishment".

In the United States, most crimes are tried at the state level, but the federal justice can deal with the most serious acts (terrorist attacks, racist crimes ...) or committed on military bases, between several states or in Native American reservations. 

Since the reinstatement of the federal capital punishment in 1988, only three people have been executed at this level, including Timothy McVeigh, in 2001, responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing (168 dead in 1995).

A divided opinion

After announcing the resumption of these executions last year, Justice Minister Bill Barr set their timetable for June, just as the coronavirus epidemic was intensifying in the country.

According to polls, support for the death penalty has eroded among Americans, but remains strong among Republican voters, at 77% in favor of applying it to murderers. Donald Trump, who will run for a second term on November 3, regularly calls for a reinforced use of this ultimate sanction, notably for police killers or drug traffickers. 

For their part, a thousand religious leaders, Catholic and evangelical, called on the president to "focus on the protection of life and not on executions" in these times of Covid-19. 

And the European Union asked Donald Trump on Friday to "reconsider" a position which, according to her, "goes against a general tendency in the United States and in the world to abolish the death penalty, by the law or in practice. "

Some American states, especially in the south, continue to apply the death penalty. Twenty-two executions took place in 2019 in the United States and seven since the start of 2020. Two other federal executions are scheduled this week, and a fourth at the end of August.

With AFP

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