U.S. to put murderer to death as federal executions spree continues

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – The U.S. government plans to execute William LeCroy, a convicted rapist and murderer, on Tuesday, the sixth in a spate of federal executions after a long hiatus in capital punishment.

The Department of Justice says it will kill LeCroy using lethal injections of pentobarbital, a barbiturate, at its execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Under President Donald Trump, who took office in early 2017 and has long been an outspoken advocate for capital punishment, the federal government has executed more men than all of Trump’s predecessors combined going back to 1963.

Another execution is planned for Thursday, when Christopher Vialva, a convicted murderer, is set to become the first Black man to face the federal death penalty under Trump.

Trump’s administration ended an informal 17-year-hiatus in carrying out the death sentence after announcing last year it would use a new one-drug lethal-injection protocol, replacing the three-drug protocol used in the last federal execution in 2003.

The new protocol revived long-running legal challenges to lethal injections. While a U.S. District Court judge, Tanya Chutkan, in Washington, D.C., last month sided with condemned men who sued the government, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the judge had made “insufficient findings and conclusions” in blocking the execution of Keith Nelson over an issue related to federal safety law on prescription drugs.

Chutkan has previously issued multiple orders halting planned executions while litigation continued, but which were soon overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose conservative majority said that legal challenges to pentobarbital injections, which are also used by several state governments to execute prisoners, were unlikely to prevail.

On Sunday, Chutkan declined to halt this week’s executions, saying the government’s violation of prescription laws did not itself amount to “irreparable harm.” She also ruled that the question of whether a condemned man would still be conscious after injection of the caustic drug and suffer agony as his lungs filled with bloody fluid prior to death was “one upon which reasonable minds could differ.”

LeCroy was convicted and sentenced to death in Georgia in 2004 for the carjacking, rape and murder of Joann Tiesler, a 30-year-old nurse, after breaking into her home. He was caught two days later in Tiesler’s vehicle at the U.S.-Canadian border with notes scribbled on the back of a torn map, according to prosecutors.

“Please, please, please forgive me Joanne,” read one note by LeCroy, who misspelled the victim’s name. “You were an angel and I killed you. Now I have to live with that and I can never go home. I am a vagabond and doomed to hell.”

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Leslie Adler)

U.S. court denies Trump administration bid to resume federal executions

By Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Monday denied the Justice Department’s request to overturn a lower court decision that temporarily stalled plans by President Donald Trump’s administration to resume executions of prisoners convicted of certain federal crimes after a 16-year hiatus.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the administration had “not satisfied the stringent requirements” to stay the lower court’s ruling. The administration had planned to resume executions of federal death row inmates starting on Dec. 9.

The ruling follows a Nov. 21 decision by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to stay the planned executions of four federal death row inmates until a long-running legal challenge to the Justice Department’s lethal injection protocol can be resolved.

The lawsuits, the first of which was filed in 2005, challenged the protocol on the grounds that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment by carrying a risk of severe pain. The suits also said the protocol violated a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act because it was written in secret without public input.

The case fell dormant during President Barack Obama’s tenure after the federal government was forced to halt executions and abandon its previous three-drug protocol due to a shortage of one of the drugs, an anesthetic called sodium thiopental.

But the case was revived in July, after U.S. Attorney General William Barr, appointed by Trump earlier in the year, scheduled the execution of five federal death row inmates and unveiled a new protocol that calls for using a single drug, pentobarbital, for the lethal injection.

(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Will Dunham)

U.S. judge stalls Trump administration’s bid to resume federal executions

By Jonathan Allen and Maria Caspani

(Reuters) – A U.S. judge has halted the scheduled executions of four inmates on federal death row, temporarily stalling an effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to resume federal executions next month after a 16-year hiatus.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over long-running legal challenges by condemned prisoners to the Department of Justice’s lethal injection protocol, issued the temporary order late on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Washington.

She said the condemned inmates suing the government were likely to succeed on at least one of their arguments, namely that the Federal Death Penalty Act requires the Bureau of Prisons to follow the execution procedures of the state in which an inmate was convicted.

“There is no statute that gives the BOP or DOJ the authority to establish a single implementation procedure for all federal executions,” Chutkan wrote in her 15-page opinion, referring to the agencies by their initials.

She said it was likely that Attorney General William Barr had overreached his authority in July when he announced that the Justice Department planned to resume federal executions using a new one-drug protocol.

Barr said the department would execute condemned inmates with pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, replacing the three-drug protocol the department used in carrying out its last execution in 2003.

Barr also announced execution dates in December and January for five men on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, all of them convicted murderers.

The announcement revived legal challenges to the lethal injection protocol dating back to 2005 that had lain dormant in federal court. Some 60 inmates are on federal death row, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who killed three people and injured more than 260 in the 2013 attack.

One of the five men with execution dates, Lezmond Mitchell, won a stay in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month. The other four men are now protected by Chutkan’s order.

“This decision prevents the government from evading accountability and making an end run around the courts by attempting to execute prisoners under a protocol that has never been authorized by Congress,” Shawn Nolan, one of the attorneys for the men facing federal execution, said in a statement.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment, but had opposed any delay in the executions saying the new protocol was lawful and the condemned inmates’ victims have a “compelling interest in the timely enforcement of a lawful death sentence.”

Condemned inmates have also said the Justice Department will breach a constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment by using pentobarbital. They cite physicians who say the corrosively alkaline chemical will likely cause them burning pain and force fluid into their lungs while they remain conscious, causing the sensation of drowning before they die.

The Justice Department says the lethal injections are humane and not excessively painful.

Most countries have abolished capital punishment.

In the United States, Trump, a death penalty supporter, has called for increasing its use for drug traffickers and mass shooters.

(Reporting by Maria Caspani and Jonathan Allen in New York; Additonal reporting by Sarah Lynch in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis)