White Supremacist Executed After Brutal Family of 4 Murders | Daniel Lewis Lee’s Last Words…..

On the morning of July 14th, 2020, the United States federal government did something it had not done in 17 years. It executed one of its own prisoners. The Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, had been quiet for most of the night. But quiet is the wrong word. Tense is closer. By the time the sun began to rise over the flat Indiana landscape, lawyers were filing emergency motions in courts across the country.

Phones were ringing in the chambers of federal judges. The Supreme Court of the United States had been awake since before midnight, fielding appeals, issuing rulings, and then issuing rulings on top of those rulings. Outside the prison walls, protesters stood in the early morning heat holding signs. Television cameras were already rolling.

The whole country was watching because what was about to happen had not happened since March 18th, 2003, when Louis Jones Jr. was put to death for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a young female soldier. 17 years of silence. And now this. Inside the execution chamber, a gurney sat waiting. IV tubes fed through a metal panel in the wall.

A light blue blanket was folded and ready. In a holding cell just steps away, a 47-year-old man with one eye sat with a spiritual advisor, breathing through what he knew were some of the final hours of his life. His name was Daniel Lewis Lee. And the federal government, the same government he had once plotted to overthrow, was about to put him to death for the murders of an Arkansas family, a gun dealer named William Mueller, his 28-year-old wife, Nancy, and her 8-year-old daughter, Sara Powell.

Outside the chamber, the legal war raged. A federal judge had blocked the execution just hours earlier, ruling the lethal injection protocol was very likely to cause extreme pain. An appeals court upheld that block. Then, at 2:00 in the morning, in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States vacated the injunction and cleared the execution to proceed.

Daniel Lewis Lee had already been strapped to the gurney for 4 hours by the time the order came through. He had been lying there, restrained, staring at the ceiling, while lawyers fought over whether he lived or died. His attorneys were not present. The victim’s family, who had begged the government not to execute him, had been denied the ability to attend due to the COVID-19 pandemic raging through the country.

When they finally came for him, Lee looked through the glass at the room of witnesses. He spoke his final words clearly, without breaking. “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man.” At 8:07 in the morning on July 14th, 2020, Daniel Lewis Lee was pronounced dead, the first federal inmate executed in 17 years, the first of four federal executions that would take place that summer under the Trump administration.

But, the story of Daniel Lewis Lee did not begin in a federal execution chamber in Indiana. It did not begin in an Arkansas swamp, where three bodies were dumped with rocks taped to their chests. It did not even begin the day he met the man who would pull him fully into a world of violence and white supremacist ideology.

It began in Yukon, Oklahoma. And it began with a boy who was already broken before the world ever had a chance to break him. Daniel Lewis Lee was born on January 31st, 1973 in Yukon, Oklahoma, a small city sitting just west of Oklahoma City. Flat and wide and unremarkable against the endless plains of the state.

His mother would later tell authorities that from early childhood, something was wrong. He suffered from seizures. He had a neurological impairment that was never fully treated, never fully understood, and never used as anything more than a footnote in a life that would eventually end on a federal gurney. He was not a child who slipped through the cracks.

He was a child who was dropped into them. By the time Daniel Lee was 15 years old in 1988, he had already come to the attention of Oklahoma County law enforcement. Not once, but twice, within a single week. The charges were burglary and arson. He was 15 years old. 4 months after those first arrests, he was charged with three counts of second-degree burglary and threatening a witness.

Three counts at 15. The courts processed him and sent him on. The following year, 1989, Lee was placed in a mental health facility in Miami, Oklahoma. It did not last. Staff documented repeated harassment, intimidation, and physical assaults on other patients. They removed him. A boy with documented neurological problems and a pattern of escalating violence was removed from mental health care because he was too violent for the mental health facility.

And then he was simply released back into the world. What followed was a period that should have alarmed everyone watching. Uh but apparently alarmed no one enough to intervene in any meaningful way. In the spring of 1989, Lee escaped from custody. Authorities relocated him. He escaped again in the summer.

 They relocated him again. While on the run those two times, Lee began gravitating toward a specific kind of community. One that would give him the belonging and the structure his fractured life had never provided. He began associating with the Ku Klux Klan. According to those who knew him during this period, Lee described finding a father figure in a senior KKK member named Bobby Norman.

A boy without a father. A boy without direction. A boy whose brain didn’t work the way it was supposed to. And into that void walked a man in white robes who told him he belonged. Uh police also suspected Lee of committing a series of armed robberies during this period on the run. Though he was never charged for them.

In August 1989, he was placed at the Central Oklahoma Juvenile Center in Tecumseh. He escaped within a week of arriving. When he was recaptured in October of that year, he told authorities he wanted to earn his GED and get treatment for his drug addiction. He sounded, by all accounts, like a young man who understood he was heading somewhere dark and wanted to find another road.

By 1990, he had found work at a fast food restaurant and was given a 30-day pass. It is tempting, looking back at that moment, to imagine a different outcome, a different story, a boy with problems, yes, but one who seemed, briefly, to want something better. That version of the story ended on July 24th, 1990. The party was held in Oklahoma City on a July night in 1990.

Lee was 17. There was alcohol, there was LSD, and there was a 22-year-old man named Joseph Wavra, the third, called Joey by the people who knew him, who made the mistake of being in the same place as Daniel Lewis Lee when Lee’s temper ignited. The specifics of what triggered it were almost absurdly minor. Joey Wavra was accused of accidentally urinating on a recliner after being intimidated by other guests at the party.

That was it. That was the beginning of the chain of events that would end with Joey Wavra dead at the bottom of a storm drain with his throat cut. Lee struck Wavra in the face. When Wavra went down, Lee kicked him while he was on the floor. Then, Lee produced a pair of handcuffs and secured Wavra’s wrists. He was joined in this by his 20-year-old cousin, John David Patton.

The two of them pulled Wavra out of the party and into the night. Party guests later recalled Patton openly asking people whether they should kill him. No one stopped them. Lee and Patton forced Wavra to a storm drain in the backyard of a nearby residence. Wavra was described as thin, weighing around 110 lb. It was Lee’s idea to use the narrow storm drain.

Patton ordered Wavra to strip naked. Lee collected the clothes and packed them into a bag for disposal. As this was happening, as Joey Wavara stood stripped and handcuffed in the dark beside a storm drain, he begged. According to witnesses, his exact words were, “Don’t make me go down there.” Lee handed Patton a rope, a garbage bag, and a paring knife.

Then, Lee left to dispose of Wavara’s clothes. While he was gone, Patton slit Joey Wavara’s throat. Then, he stabbed him multiple times in the chest and in the soles of his feet. Wavara’s body was left at the bottom of the drain. Patton returned to the party. He told the people there, “It’s cool. Joey’s okay.

” The body was discovered the following morning by the homeowner, Larry Paul Dawson, who had spent the night of the murder in jail himself, arrested for public drunkenness, and found the body when he returned home after his release. Lee was charged in the murder. During the subsequent proceedings, both his attorney and his own mother asked the court to try him as a juvenile.

The request was denied. On December 2nd, 1990, Lee pleaded guilty to robbery. The murder charge was dismissed. He received a five-year suspended sentence. He was 17 years old. He had just participated in the kidnapping and killing of another human being, and he walked out of a court with a suspended sentence. John David Patton was sentenced to life without parole.

He died in prison on January 7th, 2014. Lee’s position throughout the legal process was that he had not known what Patton intended to do with the knife. That he believed Patton would use it to cut off Wavara’s pants, not to kill him. That he was not present when the murder happened. Whether that was true or not, what is not in dispute is this.

Lee handed Patton the knife. Lee helped overpower Wavra. Lee helped restrain him. Lee helped carry him to that drain. And Lee received a suspended sentence and returned to the world. The five years between Joey Wavra’s death and Daniel Lewis Lee’s arrival in the orbit of Chevie Kehoe were not quiet ones. They were not the years of a man who had confronted what he had been part of and changed course.

They were the years of a man who was accelerating. Between 1991 and 1995, Lee accumulated charges in five separate states: Oklahoma, Tennessee, Washington, Wyoming, and Florida. Reckless driving, larceny, battery, failure to appear in court, assault with a dangerous weapon, resisting arrest, trespassing. He was moving constantly, leaving wreckage in each place he landed and moving on before it fully caught up with him.

In early 1995, Lee was living in Bowling Green, Kentucky with his girlfriend, Jennifer Givens, who was pregnant with their daughter. One day, Givens found something in Lee’s belongings, a photograph of Adolf Hitler. She tore it up. Lee beat her. Givens would later state that Lee was physically abusive throughout their entire relationship, including during the pregnancy.

He was arrested for the assault. That same year, on May 3rd, 1995, Lee was convicted of carrying a concealed weapon in Martin County, Florida. He was sentenced to 6 months probation. That same year, Lee lost his left eye. The circumstances were consistent with who he was. He was in a bar in Spokane, Washington.

He directed a racial slur at a Native American man. The confrontation escalated and Lee was struck by a cue ball. He lost the eye. And in what would become one of the more telling details of his personality, he refused to wear an eye patch. Among his neo-Nazi skinhead associates in Spokane, this earned him a nickname.

They called him Cyclops. He went by Cy. It was in Spokane in 1995 and that Daniel Lewis Lee met the man who would give his hatred a direction, his violence a purpose, and his life an ideology that would ultimately lead three innocent people to the bottom of an Arkansas river. His name was Chevie Kehoe. Chevie Kehoe was 23 years old when Lee met him.

He was the son of Kirby Kehoe, a man described by federal authorities as one who had taught and lived the anti-government movement, the racial movement, and essentially every extremist ideology available to him. Chevie had grown up steeped in Christian Identity Theology, a belief system that combined white supremacy with a particular reading of biblical text to argue that white Europeans were the true Israelites and that other races were spiritually inferior.

Out of this worldview, Chevie Kehoe built an organization he called the Aryan People’s Republic or APR. He modeled it after a violent white supremacist organization known as The Order, which had carried out bombings, armored car robberies, and assassinations in the 1980s in pursuit of the same dream. A white ethno-state carved out of the Pacific Northwest.

Kehoe called this vision the Northwest Territorial Imperative. To fund this vision, to purchase land, to arm his people, Kehoe needed money. And he needed men willing to do what it took to get it. Daniel Lewis Lee, a man who had spent his young adult life associating with the clan, who had already participated in one killing, who had a documented pattern of violence reaching back to age 15, was exactly what Chevie Kehoe was looking for.

Lee joined the APR. He was recruited in. He embraced the ideology, or at least the permission it gave him. He had found, once again, what Bobby Norman and the clan had given him back in 1989. A family, a purpose, a set of people who told him his anger had a righteous direction. Kehoe had already demonstrated he was serious about his methods.

In February 1995, months before Lee officially joined, Kehoe and his father had broken into the home of a gun dealer in rural Arkansas named William Mueller. Mueller wasn’t home. The Kehoes walked through his property and helped themselves to approximately $50,000 worth of coins, cash, and firearms. They left.

Mueller filed a report, and Kehoe filed the location away in his memory. In the spring of 1996, Kehoe decided it was time to go back. William Frederick Mueller was 52 years old and had spent much of his adult life around guns. He was a licensed federal firearms dealer who bought, sold, and traded at gun shows across the country.

He lived with his wife, 28-year-old Nancy Ann Mueller, born Nancy Branch, and Nancy’s daughter from a previous relationship, 8-year-old Sara Elizabeth Powell. They lived near Tilly in Pope County, Arkansas, about 75 miles northwest of Little Rock. It was rural land, quiet, the kind of place where people minded their own business and trusted their neighbors.

Mueller kept significant stores of weapons, ammunition, and cash at the property. He had registered the serial numbers of many of his firearms, a practice that would prove critical later. Kehoe knew about the weapons because he had already stolen from Mueller once. He knew the layout. He knew roughly what was there.

And he knew that Mueller, as a gun dealer who operated largely in cash, was unlikely to be keeping his money in a bank. In January 1996, Chevie Kehoe and Daniel Lewis Lee left Washington state and drove to Arkansas. They brought with them police raid clothing, tactical gear that would allow them to present themselves convincingly as law enforcement officers.

The plan was straightforward in its brutality. Arrive, take everything, leave no witnesses. On January 11th, 1996, they arrived at the Mueller property. The family was not home, so they waited. When William and Nancy Mueller returned with Sara, Lee and Kehoe were ready. They overpowered the couple and incapacitated them.

Then, they turned their attention to the child. Sara Powell, 8 years old, was subjected to electric shocks from a cattle prod as Lee and Kehoe demanded she tell them where the cash, guns, and ammunition were hidden. An 8-year-old girl shocked with a cattle prod until she gave up the information they wanted. They found $50,000 in cash and gold, the equivalent of over $100,000 today, along with $30,000 worth of firearms and firearm parts.

Then, with everything they had come for, they made their decision about what to do with the three people who could identify them. Each of the three victims, William, Nancy, and Sara, was shot with a stun gun. Then, plastic bags were placed over their heads. The bags were sealed shut with duct tape. And Lee and Kehoe waited while William Mueller, Nancy Mueller, and 8-year-old Sara Powell suffocated to death.

According to Chevie Kehoe’s own mother, Gloria, Lee had confessed to his role in the murders of William and Nancy. But he had insisted to her and to others that he had refused to kill Sara. That when the moment came to end the child’s life, he had stepped back. And that Chevie Kehoe had done it himself. Whether that distinction matters morally is a question that would eventually consume courts, prosecutors, and the victims’ own family for more than two decades.

What is not in dispute is that Daniel Lewis Lee was present. That he participated in the restraint, the torture, and the suffocation of all the three victims. And that he left the bodies property with the bodies in the vehicle. They drove 45 miles to the Illinois River. They duct taped rocks to each of the three bodies, William, Nancy, 8-year-old Sarah, and they threw each one into the water.

Daniel Lewis Lee received between $3,000 and $4,000 for his role in the crime and a pistol. Kehoe and his family drove the stolen property back to Spokane, Washington, stopping along the way at the Christian Identity Community of Elohim City, Oklahoma. The Muellers’ home sat empty. The bodies sank. Nobody reported the family missing until January 1996, when Nancy’s mother, Arlin Branch Peterson, went to the Pope County Sheriff’s Office.

A month later, the family’s vehicle was found 45 minutes from their home, hidden in brush and woods. But there were no answers. No bodies, no suspects, no leads that went anywhere yet. And the bodies of William, Nancy, and Sarah remained at the bottom of the water for more than 5 months. On June 28th, 1996, a couple fishing near Lake Dardanelle, 85 miles south of the Muellers’ home, caught something in their line.

It was a part of a body. Law enforcement entered the water and found the rest. Sarah Powell’s body was recovered first. A plastic bag, still duct-taped in place, was wrapped around her head. The medical examiner noted blue paint flakes in the tape. A database search matched the paint to a blue General Motors vehicle.

The investigation was now a triple homicide, and it had just found its first real thread. William Mueller had been careful about one thing. He had registered the serial numbers of many of his firearms. Not all gun dealers did, but Mueller had perhaps as insurance against exactly this kind of theft. That decision made long before January 11th, 1996 would be what unraveled everything.

In July 1996, a convicted felon named Travis Brake was arrested in South Dakota. He had a gun on him. The serial number came back to William Mueller. Brake told authorities he had purchased a weapon at a gun show from a man he identified from a photograph as Kirby Kehoe, Chevie’s father. That lead pointed investigators toward the Kehoe family.

And when they began pulling that thread, the entire enterprise began to come apart. Another stolen gun traced back to Chevie Kehoe directly. Federal agents began building a picture of a criminal organization, the APR, and its activities across multiple states. In October 1996, an acquaintance of Kehoe’s named Farren Lovelace was found hiding in a cabin in the Idaho wilderness.

Near the cabin was a stolen trailer from Arkansas. Inside the trailer were guns, ammunition, and camping equipment stolen from the Mueller property. Lovelace began talking. What he told investigators was not just about the Mueller murders. It was about an entire network of violence, robbery, and extremist activity that had been operating for years.

By December 1996, law enforcement knew enough to be actively hunting both Kehoe and Lee. On December 10th, 1996, Lee’s former roommate was arrested in South Dakota with another Mueller rifle. He told investigators he had gotten it from Kehoe. And he called Lee to warn him that authorities were closing in. The following day, Lee left Washington for Oklahoma.

Kehoe and his family fled as well, so moving across multiple states, attempting to sell stolen weapons at gun shows. On February 15th, 1997, Chevie Kehoe and his brother Shayne engaged in a gunfight with law enforcement officers in Wilmington, Ohio. Both escaped. Later the same day, Kehoe was involved in a second shootout before escaping again.

His brother Shayne would eventually cooperate with federal authorities. His mother Gloria would become a prosecution witness. The family that had built itself around an ideology of violence and white supremacy began to collapse inward. Chevie Kehoe was arrested on June 17th, 1997 in Cedar City, Utah. Federal agencies, the FBI, the ATF, and the Pope County Sheriff’s Office had been watching Daniel Lewis Lee for several weeks by the time they moved on him.

On September 24th, 1997, the task force arrested Lee at his mother’s house in Yukon, Oklahoma. He was extradited to Pope County, Arkansas. Within days of arrival, he was being recorded for assaulting other inmates. In February 1998, he was reported for attempting to convince a fellow inmate to smuggle a gun into prison using a hollowed-out radio discovered in Lee’s cell.

On February 23rd, 1998, after being denied access to a phone by Pulaski County Sheriff’s Deputy Nancy Cummings, Lee allegedly, threatened her directly. He told her she was going to die like the others. He told her he would blow her head off. This was a man in custody on federal murder charges. The violence was not something he could turn off.

The joint trial of Chevie Kehoe and Daniel Lewis Lee began in November 1998 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. The murders were prosecuted as federal crimes because they had been committed in furtherance of a racketeering enterprise, the Aryan Peoples Republic. The prosecution’s case was built on a foundation of physical evidence, seized weapons, financial records, and a remarkable number of witnesses from within Kehoe and Lee’s own circle, including Gloria Kehoe, Chevie’s mother,

who took the stand against her own son. The stolen guns, still traceable through Weavers Arms serial number records, the duct tape with its distinctive blue paint flakes, the testimony of those to whom both men had boasted about the crime. The evidence against both men was overwhelming. On May 4th, 1999, Daniel Lewis Lee was convicted on three counts of murder in aid of racketeering.

10 days later, on May 14th, 1999, the jury returned to the question of punishment. And this is where the story took a turn that would haunt the case for the next 21 years. Chevie Kehoe, the man who had founded the APR, who had recruited Lee, who had planned the Mueller robbery, who had, according to multiple accounts, personally killed 8-year-old Sara Powell, was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The jury, in its deliberations, had declined to impose the death penalty on the ringleader. Then, they sentenced Daniel Lewis Lee to death. The prosecutors who had tried the case were not responsible for this outcome in the way that might be assumed. The local US Attorney, Paula Casey, had actually requested that US Attorney General Janet Reno withdraw the death penalty as an option for Lee’s punishment, particularly after watching Kehoe receive life.

She believed the sentencing disparity was unjust. Her request was denied. Deputy US Attorney General Eric Holder directed prosecutors to continue seeking death for Lee. The trial judge who presided over the case shared Casey’s misgivings. He resisted the death sentence for Lee and ordered a new sentencing hearing.

A federal appeals court reversed his decision and reinstated the death sentence in 2001. The centerpiece of the prosecution’s argument for death had been a psychological evaluation in which Lee was classified as a psychopath, specifically, a future danger who would remain a threat to others for as long as he lived, even within prison walls.

That evaluation and the checklist on which it was based would later be formally disavowed by the very expert who administered it. The methodology fell out of use in federal capital cases. Lee was, according to his attorneys, the only person on federal death row whose death sentence rested primarily on that discredited assessment.

Both the lead prosecutor and the trial judge would go on to write letters as part of Lee’s 2014 clemency application to President Obama urging the Department of Justice to commute his sentence. Obama commuted two death sentences before leaving office. Lee’s was not one of them. The family of Nancy Mueller and Sara Powell had opposed the death penalty for Lee from the moment Kehoe received life.

Nancy’s mother, Earlene Branch Peterson, went further than most. She became one of the most vocal opponents of Lee’s execution stating publicly that she did not want it done in her daughter’s name. “I can’t see how executing Daniel Lee will honor my daughter in any way,” she said. “In fact, it’s kind of like it dirties her name because she wouldn’t want it and I don’t want it.

” Monica Veillette a niece and cousin of two of the victims, expressed the family’s position plainly. “The last part of my aunt’s story is someone being killed in her name,” she said. “Like we’re angry, vengeful people instead of the loving person she was.” The government executed Daniel Lewis Lee anyway. Daniel Lewis Lee arrived on federal death row in 1999.

He would spend 21 years there watching administrations come and go, watching the legal machinery of appeals grind forward and backward, watching the country outside change in ways he could only glimpse through the narrow window of his confinement. The appeals were extensive and ultimately unsuccessful. In 2004, the 8th Circuit affirmed his conviction and sentence.

In 2013, it affirmed the denial of his habeas corpus petition. In 2015, it affirmed the denial of a subsequent habeas motion. By April 17th, 2017, Lee had exhausted his appeals entirely. Under normal circumstances, that would have meant the end was approaching rapidly. But the federal government had been under a de facto moratorium on executions for years.

No federal inmate had been put to death since 2003. The machinery sat idle. His attorneys never stopped pushing. They argued that DNA evidence existed in the case. Evidence that had not been tested. Evidence that they believed could cast doubt on aspects of Lee’s conviction. In the days before his execution, US District Judge Lee P.

Rudofsky denied their request to compare DNA from a hair connected to the murder with other suspects in the case. The evidence went untested. Lee himself, according to his attorneys, had long since renounced his white supremacist beliefs. Whether that claim is credible, whether a man who embraced that ideology in his teens and early 20s could genuinely walk away from it, is not something the court system had any mechanism to weigh.

What the court system could weigh was the record of violence that stretched from Oklahoma City in 1988 to Pope County, Arkansas in 1996. And that record was what it was. In July 2019, Attorney General William Barr announced that the federal government would resume executions. Daniel Lewis Lee was scheduled to go first.

His execution was set initially for December 9th, 2019, then moved, then blocked by a series of legal challenges, then rescheduled. The legal challenges concerned the execution protocol, specifically the government’s plan to use a single drug, pentobarbital, rather than the three-drug cocktail that had been the standard in the capital cases.

Inmates and their attorneys argued the protocol had not been adequately tested and could cause extreme suffering. Courts agreed, then disagreed, then agreed again. Through all of it, the victims’ family kept pushing back. They asked the government to commute to Lee’s sentence. They filed suit to try to stop the execution on the grounds that traveling to witness it during a COVID-19 pandemic put their lives at risk.

The Seventh Circuit ruled that while allowing victims’ families to attend executions was standard practice, there was no legal right to attendance and denied a change in date. The family’s emergency appeal went to the Supreme Court. Before the Supreme Court could rule on that question, a federal judge issued a broader halt to all federal executions.

And then the night of July 13th, 2020 began. The execution was scheduled for 4:00 in the afternoon on July 13th, 2020. It did not happen at 4:00 in the afternoon. A federal district court in Washington, D.C. had issued a preliminary injunction earlier that day, ruling that the condemned inmates, including Lee, had not exhausted their challenges to the execution protocol and were likely to succeed in their argument that the government’s lethal injection method was very likely to cause extreme pain and needless suffering.

The court halted all four executions. The Bureau of Prisons did not stand down. Federal prosecutors began filing motions in multiple courts simultaneously. The appeals process ran at a speed that the legal system is almost never asked to produce. Moving through district courts, circuit courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court of the United States across the span of hours rather than months.

Daniel Lewis Lee was strapped to the gurney at 4:00 in the morning on July 14th, the morning after the scheduled execution date. The Bureau of Prisons had attempted to begin the process after the Supreme Court vacated the DC District Court’s injunction. But defense counsel immediately notified the BOP that a separate stay of execution issued by an Arkansas federal court in December 2019 was still in effect.

The BOP did not remove Lee from the gurney. They left him strapped there while federal prosecutors filed new motions with the 8th Circuit to terminate the Arkansas stay. For 4 hours, Daniel Lewis Lee lay strapped to the execution gurney while lawyers argued about whether he should be removed from it or killed on it.

His attorneys were not permitted to be present with him. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, they had not been able to meet with him in person for months. For 3 months leading up to the execution, Lee had not had a single confidential conversation with his legal team in person. The victims’ family, the people in whose name the government claimed to be acting, were not there, either.

They had been blocked from attending because of the pandemic. They were at home following the legal developments in real time as the government executed a man they had spent years trying to save. At 2:01 in the morning, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an unsigned order in a 5-to-4 decision vacating the injunction that had blocked the execution.

Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote in dissent that it was time for the court to seriously reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty itself. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Ginsburg, wrote separately to criticize what she called the court’s accelerated decision-making, stating that the court had forever deprived the respondents of their ability to press a constitutional challenge to their lethal injections.

The Eighth Circuit terminated the Arkansas stay at approximately 7:30 in the morning, and the Bureau of Prisons provided Lee’s attorneys, not in person, not with any opportunity for a final visit, but through a one-page document, notification of the new execution time. At some point in those final minutes, a spiritual adviser was present with Lee.

Guards were present. The gurney was there. The IV lines were threaded through the wall. Daniel Lewis Lee was wheeled into the execution chamber with more than half his body covered in a light blue blanket. IV tubes ran from his arms through a metal panel. He breathed heavily. He looked through the glass at the media witness room.

And he spoke, “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man.” The pentobarbital was administered. Lee moved his legs and feet. He breathed heavily. And then, the movement stopped. At 8:07 in the morning on July 14th, 2020, a senior prison official announced the time of death.

The curtain closed. Attorney General William Barr issued a statement. Today, Lee finally faced the justice he deserved. The American people have made the considered choice to permit capital punishment for the most egregious federal crimes, and justice was done today in implementing the sentence for Lee’s horrific offenses.

Ruth Friedman, Lee’s attorney, issued her own. It is shameful that the government saw fit to carry out this execution during a pandemic. It is shameful that the government saw fit to carry out this execution when counsel for Danny Lee could not be present with him. And when the judges in his case, and even the family of his victims, urged against it.

And it is beyond shameful that the government, in the end, a carried out this execution in haste, in the middle of the night, while the country was sleeping. Arlene Branch Peterson, the mother of Nancy Mueller, never got to witness what the government did in her daughter’s name. She was at home when it happened.

She had spent years trying to stop it. She had told anyone willing to listen that her daughter would not have wanted this. That Nancy was a loving person. That executing a man in her name made her family look like angry, vengeful people when they were not. William Mueller, Nancy Mueller, and Sarah Elizabeth Powell were murdered on January 11th, 1996.

Sarah was 8 years old. Their bodies were in the water for 5 months before anyone found them. They were duct taped into plastic bags and weighed down with rocks by men who believed they were building a nation. Chevie Kehoe, the man who planned the robbery, founded the organization, and killed the child when his accomplice refused, remains alive in federal prison.

He is serving three consecutive life sentences. Daniel Lewis Lee, who drove to Arkansas, waited in a dead family’s home, helped overpower and restrain three people, helped suffocate them, helped throw their bodies in a river, and received a pistol and a few thousand dollars for his trouble, is dead. Executed by the federal government at 8:07 in the morning on July 14th, 2020, becoming the first federal inmate put to death in 17 years.

Whether justice was served that morning depends almost entirely on how you define the word. The man who orchestrated the crime is alive. The man who followed his lead is dead. The family of the victims opposed the outcome. Uh the judge and prosecutor who handled the case opposed the outcome. The psychological evidence used to sentence him to death, rather than life, had been discredited by the time the needle went in.

What is not in question is what happened in Tilly, Arkansas, on January 11th, 1996. What was done to William, Nancy, and Sarah Muller. The cattle prod, the duct tape, the plastic bags, the river, the rocks. Daniel Lewis Lee was part of that. He was there. He participated. And for 21 years, he sat on a gurney and waited for the country to decide what to do about it.

On the morning of July 14th, 2020, it decided.