July 17 (UPI) -- The U.S. government on Friday is preparing to carry out its third execution this week as lawyers and activists denounced the two earlier executions for being conducted without valid death warrants.
Dustin Lee Honken, 52, was given the death penalty in 2005 for the 1993 deaths of Greg Nicholson, his girlfriend Lori Ann Duncan, and her daughters, Kandace Duncan and Amber Duncan in Iowa.
Months later he also killed Terry DeGeus. His accomplice, former girlfriend Angela Johnson, also received the death penalty for her involvement, but her sentenced was reduced to life imprisonment.
Honken and his lawyers are awaiting a ruling on an application for a stay challenging the federal government's execution protocol.
When U.S. Attorney General William Barr ordered the resumption of federal executions in July 2019, he ordered that all lethal injections will be carried out with a single drug -- pentobarbital.
Lawyers argued that the lethal injection protocol is "arbitrary and capricious" and violates the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Defense attorneys have also asked for their client's spiritual adviser to be able to minister to him before and during the execution at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.
While individual states have carried out executions for the past four decades, federal executions have been on a hiatus since 2003. That year, the U.S. government put to death Gulf War veteran Louis Jones Jr. for the rape and murder of a fellow soldier, Pvt. Tracie McBride in 1995.
The U.S. government carried out its first executions since then this week -- Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death early Tuesday and Wesley Purkey early Thursday, both on the morning after their scheduled execution dates.
Lawyers and advocates for the men said the U.S. government wasn't legally allowed to carry out the executions because their death warrants expired at 11:59 p.m. the night before.
"Under federal law, this should have precluded any execution without sufficient notice of a new date and time for the execution," Purkey's lawyer, Rebecca Woodman, said Thursday. "Reporters in Terre Haute tweeted that the government was, nevertheless, moving forward with its plans to execute Mr. Purkey."
Sister Helen Prejean with the Ministry Against the Death Penalty said this week's executions are evidence that the federal government "has gone rogue." She called for Congress to conduct an investigation into the proceedings.
RELATED | USA | Statement from Sister Helen Prejean on the Federal Government’s Execution of Wesley Purkey
"The deeply flawed execution process the [Department of Justice] is overseeing is not about justice, nor about the victims' families. It is a flexing of political muscle by an administration which is an habitual offender when it comes to the abuse of power," she said.
If his lethal injection goes forward, Honken will be the first Iowan to be executed since 1963. The state outlawed the death penalty in 1965.
Source: upi.com, Danielle Haynes, July 17, 2020
Iowa drug kingpin who killed 5 set for execution Friday
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) — A meth kingpin from Iowa who killed five people, including two young girls, is scheduled Friday to become the third federal inmate to be executed this week, following a 17-year pause in federal executions.
Dustin Honken, 52, was sentenced to death for killing government informants and children in his effort to thwart his drug trafficking prosecution in 1993.
Honken is set to die by a lethal injection of the powerful sedative pentobarbital at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he’s been on death row since 2005. His lawyers are making last-minute pleas for a reprieve, but their chances of success seem remote after the Supreme Court reversed lower-court orders that sought to block the executions of two other men this week.
Honken grew up in Iowa, but moved with a friend to Arizona to try to get rich by cooking meth, which he learned to do after studying chemistry in college. They distributed their product through two dealers based in Iowa.
One of those dealers was Greg Nicholson, who began cooperating with investigators in 1993 after coming under suspicion. Honken was arrested and indicted for conspiring to manufacture meth after Nicholson secretly recorded Honken and testified before a grand jury.
Honken informed the court that he would plead guilty. But days before his July 1993 plea hearing, he and his girlfriend, Angela Johnson, went searching for Nicholson.
They found him at the home where he lived with his girlfriend, Lori Duncan, and her daughters, 10-year-old Kandi and 6-year-old Amber. The four were kidnapped, shot to death and buried, but their bodies weren’t found for seven years. Honken also killed his other dealer, 32-year-old Terry DeGeus, whose body was found a few miles away from Honken’s other victims.
Honken was convicted of the Iowa killings in 2004 in a trial that featured extraordinary security measures, including an anonymous jury. Honken was bolted to the floor of the courtroom and wore a stun belt under his clothing to prevent escape attempts.
The jury recommended a death sentence and U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett, who said he generally opposes the death penalty, agreed.
“I am not going to lose any sleep if he is executed,” said Bennett, who has since retired from the bench. “Normally I would, but the evidence was so overwhelming.”
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde