A federal judge on Monday ordered a new delay in federal executions, hours before the first lethal injection in nearly two decades was scheduled to be carried out at a federal prison in Indiana. The Trump administration immediately appealed to a higher court, asking that the executions move forward, the Associated Press reports. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., said there are still legal issues to resolve and that “the public is not served by short-circuiting legitimate judicial process.” On Sunday, a federal appeals court in Illinois ruled that the execution can proceed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit overturned a lower court order that had put the execution of 47-year-old Daniel Lee on hold. Lee was convicted in Arkansas of the 1996 killings of gun dealer William Mueller, his wife and her 8-year-old daughter.
Chief District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson in Indiana delayed the execution because of concerns from the family of the victims about the coronavirus pandemic.The Seventh Circuit found that the claim from the victims’ family “lacks any arguable legal basis and is therefore frivolous.” The Justice Department said the Bureau of Prisons has implemented additional safety protocols because of the pandemic, and the family’s concerns “do not outweigh the public interest in finally carrying out the lawfully imposed sentence in this case.” The relatives planned to travel thousands of miles and witness the execution in a small room where the social distancing is virtually impossible. There are four confirmed coronavirus cases among inmates at the prison, and one inmate has died. The victims’ family was not trying to overturn Lee’s death sentence but instead “seek to exercise their lawful rights to attend the execution of Lee, so that they can be together … as they grieve their losses.”