US Supreme Court Clears Way For Resuming Federal Executions

US Supreme Court Clears Way for Resuming Federal Executions

The US Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for federal executions to resume after 17 years by denying a legal challenge from four convicted murderers

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th June, 2020) The US Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for Federal executions to resume after 17 years by denying a legal challenge from four convicted murderers.

The four asked for a stay of execution by arguing that federal executions must adhere to specific protocols used by US states where each of them was sentenced, which includes the method of killing the convicted murderers.

"The application for a stay of the mandate pending the disposition of the petition for a writ of certiorari presented to the Chief Justice and referred to the Court is denied," the US Supreme Court said.

The two dissenting Justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, said they would have approved the petition to block the executions and would appeal for such a writ.

However, the four executions - the first federal ones since 2003 - are now scheduled to go ahead starting on July 13 and will continue into August.

White supremacist Danny Lee was convicted of murdering a family of three in Arkansas including an eight-year-old girl.

Wesley Ira Purkey was convicted of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl and 80-year-old woman in Kansas.

Dustin Lee Honkin, who prefigured the character Walter White in the television series "breaking Bad," killed five people in Iowa in 1993 including two law enforcement informants and a mother and her two daughters aged six and ten. He was also one of the Midwest's early, large-scale producers of methamphetamine.

Keith Dwayne Nelson kidnapped a ten-year-old girl in Kansas in front of her home and raped her in a forest behind a church before strangling her with a wire.