Last minute legal arguments continued to delay the scheduled execution of federal death row inmate Wesley Ira Purkey at the Terre Haute penitentiary Wednesday night, following a pattern of similar wrangling over another capital punishment case 48 hours earlier.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., imposed two injunctions prohibiting the federal Bureau of Prisons from moving forward with Purkey’s execution. The Justice Department immediately appealed in both cases.
Chutkan is the same judge who imposed an injunction in the case of Daniel Lewis Lee, who, on Tuesday, became the first federal inmate to be put to death in 17 years, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned her ruling on a 5-4 split decision.
One of the injunctions imposed Wednesday would halt not only Purkey's execution, but another that has been scheduled for Friday and one in August.
Purkey's attorneys argue that he suffers from dementia and is unaware of what is happening to him.
Rebecca Woodman, one of Purkey's attorneys, said in a statement that while Purkey has accepted responsibility for the crime, "he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him.
"By staying Wes’s execution, the court’s action signals the importance of allowing him to present the extensive, available medical evidence demonstrating his incompetency to be executed," she said.
The other legal arguments center over the government's choice of lethal injection drug and a religious claim that the government is putting the inmates' spiritual advisors at risk by scheduling the executions during a global pandemic.
Purkey, 68, of Kansas was convicted on Nov. 3, 2003, of the violent rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl in Missouri. Officials said he then dismembered, burned and dumped the girl’s body in a septic pond.
A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri found Purkey guilty of kidnapping a child resulting in the child’s death, and he was sentenced to death.
Purkey was also was convicted in state court of using a claw hammer to bludgeon to death an 80-year-old woman who suffered from polio and walked with a cane.The 14-page order from Chutkan states that Purkey experienced repeated sexual abuse and molestation by those care for him as a child. He suffered multiple traumatic brain injuries, the first in 1968 when he was 16.
The order states that he suffered brain injuries again when he was 20 and 24.
"At 14, he was first examined for possible brain damage, and at 18, he was diagnosed with schizophrenic reaction, schizoaffective disorder, and depression superimposed upon a preexisting antisocial personality," court documents state. "At 68, he suffers from progressive dementia, schizophrenia, complex-post traumatic stress disorder, and severe mental illness."
The order says that Purkey seeks to enjoin his execution on the grounds that he is not currently competent to be executed, and that Attorney General William Barr and Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal have not "afforded him due process in connection with this Eighth Amendment claim."
The Eighth Amendment prohibits the federal government from imposing excessive bail, excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishments.
In its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals, the government says the court issuing the stay of execution lacks jurisdiction to do so, and that Purkey has failed to make a threshold showing of incompetency.
Purkey's attorneys said in a news release Wednesday that the government received test results last week that showed "scientific confirmation of significant structural abnormalities in Mr. Purkey’s brain that are consistent with cognitive impairment such as vascular dementia or other conditions."
They also argue that the harm caused by a stay is greater than the harm caused by carrying out the execution as planned.
"The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the Government and the victims’ compelling interest in the timely enforcement of a death sentence," court documents state. “The people of Missouri, the surviving victims of [the condemned inmate’s] crimes, and others like them deserve better. Even the principal dissent acknowledges that the long delays that now typically occur between the time an offender is sentenced to death and his execution are excessive.”
Attorneys for Purkey filed a response to DOJ's request for an emergency suspension of the lower court's injunction, saying, "a stay pending appeal is available 'only under extraordinary circumstances,' and the 'district court’s conclusion that a stay is unwarranted is entitled to considerable deference.' "
In a letter to Barr, the leaders of Mental Health America, the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Alliance on Mental Illness urge him to commute the execution of Purkey to life without parole.
"In expressing our position, we do not trivialize in any way the magnitude of Purkey’s crime or the suffering of his victim and her family," they write. "However, we are gravely concerned that the issues concerning Purkey’s competence to be executed have not been adequately considered by the U.S. or by any court of law."
Another court battle over execution
The legal battle preceding Purkey's execution is similar to the battle waged before Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death early Tuesday.
Lee's execution was originally scheduled for 4 p.m. Monday, but a series of legal challenges delayed his death. A 5-4 Supreme Court decision in the early hours of the morning Tuesday allowed him to be put to death, but a last-minute appeal to the 8th Circuit Court halted the issue for several more hours.
While judges considered that appeal, Lee remained strapped to a gurney for about four hours Tuesday morning.
The Supreme Court's decision came hours after a panel of federal appeals judges in the District of Columbia denied the Department of Justice's motion to stay an injunction that pressed pause on all federal executions.
Lee was among more than a dozen people attached to a lawsuit arguing that the drug injection violates their Eighth Amendment rights — essentially, that the effects of the drug after it is administered constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
The Bureau of Prisons uses a single drug, pentobarbital, in executions. The inmates' attorneys argued the drug is likely to cause extreme pain, as it induces flash pulmonary edema, producing a drowning sensation.
Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, was found guilty of murdering a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl, in January 1996 in Arkansas. He was convicted of murder in aid of racketeering three years later and was sentenced to death.
Source: indystar.com, Justin L. Mack, July 15, 2020
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