The U.S. federal government is set to execute an inmate for the first time in 17 years, after a federal appeals court ruling on the matter Sunday.
Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group from Yukon, Oklahoma, was convicted of murdering a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl in 1996.
Sunday’s decision follows a string of appeals, during which even the family of the victims opposed the execution.
Lee’s family had filed an appeal saying that traveling thousands of kilometers to witness the execution in a small room where social distancing is not possible would put them at risk of contracting the novel coronavirus.
Lee is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 4pm local time on Monday at a federal prison in Indiana.
Last month, he U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a legal challenge to a new lethal injection protocol proposed for federal executions, clearing the way for the Trump administration to resume executing federal death row inmates for the first time in nearly two decades.
…