A white supremacist has been killed by lethal injection in the first US federal execution for nearly two decades.
Daniel Lewis Lee, who tortured and murdered a couple and their eight-year-old daughter and dumped them in water, was executed at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
“I didn’t do it,” he said just before he was killed.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m not a murderer. … You’re killing an innocent man.”
Lee’s execution was postponed yesterday over a legal challenge against a new injection protocol, but the Supreme Court stepped in and ruled 5-4 that it could go ahead.
Relatives of those killed by Lee in 1996 had wanted him to get a life sentence in prison and said the execution wasn’t be done in their name.
Lee was recruited into a white supremacist group called the Aryan Peoples’ Republic in 1995 by co-defendant Chevie Kehoe.
Two years later, they were arrested for killing gun dealer William Mueller and his wife and daughter in Tilly, Arkansas.
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They stole guns and $50,000 from the family as part of a plan to set up a whites-only nation, said prosecutors at their 1999 trial.
Lee and Kehoe are said to have tortured them using stun guns and by putting plastic bags over their heads.
Rocks were attached to their bodies and they were dumped in a nearby bayou.