A former white supremacist sentenced to death for a triple murder was executed on Tuesday during the first federal execution in 17 years in the United States, spurred on by the government of Donald Trump who demands an increased use of the death penalty. Daniel Lee, died at 8:07 a.m. (12:07 p.m. GMT) of a lethal injection at Terre Haute prison in Indiana, the Department of Justice announced.
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" You kill an innocent man ," said the man before he died, according to an Indianapolis Star reporter who attended the execution. Daniel Lee's lawyer, Ruth Friedman, denounced in an official statement an execution carried out " with haste, in the middle of the night, while the country was asleep ". She pointed out that the condemned man had waited four hours, strapped to his death bed, awaiting the result of a final appeal.
The American section of Amnesty International said it was " horrified " by this execution " which goes against a worldwide tendency to abandon the death penalty ". In America, the debate on the application of the death penalty, reinstated in 1988 at the federal level, remains lively with support eroded in the American population but which remains strong among Republican voters.
In this country, most crimes are tried at the state level and some, especially in the South, continue to apply the death penalty. Seven people were thus executed by local jurisdictions in 2020. But the federal justice can seize the most serious acts (attacks, racist crimes ...) or committed on military bases, between several States or on Amerindian reservations. Since 1988, only three people have been executed at the federal level, including Timothy McVeigh, responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing (168 dead in 1995) in 2001.
