First federal prisoner in 17 years executed hours after Supreme Court decision

Daniel Lewis Lee on Tuesday became the first federal prisoner executed in over 17 years, just hours after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against a last-minute attempt to halt the execution.

Lee, 47, a former white supremacist convicted of killing a family of three in 1996, was executed by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., and pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m., according to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

“You’re killing an innocent man,” Lee said with his final words, according to a reporter with the Indianapolis Star who witnesses the execution

Lee's killing came just hours after the Supreme Court overruled a lower court and cleared the way for federal executions to be carried out for the first time since 2003.

The conservative majority court in an unsigned opinion issued around 2 a.m. rejected inmate claims that the lethal injection protocol adopted by the Department of Justice last year amounted to unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

The majority said vacating the lower court’s decision is warranted because the inmates are unlikely to succeed “on the merits of their Eighth Amendment claim,” which outlaws cruel and unusual punishment, and faced "an exceedingly high bar.”

The court’s four more liberal members, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented on various grounds.

Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Ginsburg and Kagan, said the court’s “rush to dispose of this litigation in an emergency posture” removed the opportunity for a “meaningful judicial review of the grave, fact-heavy challenges respondents bring to the way in which the government plans to execute them.”