Four federal executions were scheduled but a district court judge had suspended them to allow for legal challenges to the lethal injection that was to be used.
The district court decision had come just hours before the first execution, of former white supremacist Daniel Lewis Lee, who was convicted with another man of murdering a family of three during a robbery intended to help fund the founding of an “Aryan Peoples Republic
“We vacate the District Court’s preliminary injunction so that the… executions may proceed as planned.”
Four federal executions were scheduled but a district court judge had suspended them to allow for legal challenges to the lethal injection that was to be used.
The district court decision had come just hours before the first execution, of former white supremacist Daniel Lewis Lee, who was convicted with another man of murdering a family of three during a robbery intended to help fund the founding of an “Aryan Peoples Republic”.
Lee would be the first federal inmate to be executed in the United States since 2003 and the first since President Donald Trump announced plans to resume federal executions.
There have been just three federal executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1988
The prisoners “have not made the showing required to justify last-minute intervention by a Federal Court,” the Supreme Court said in a ruling released in the early hours of Tuesday.
In staying the executions, District Judge Tanya Chutkan had ruled that the use of a single drug, pentobarbital, to carry out the executions could cause “extreme pain and needless suffering” and may violate a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
An appeals court had upheld that order before the Supreme Court vacated it.
