Danny Lee’s Death Penalty: Conviction, Appeals, and Execution

Daniel Lewis “Danny” Lee was put to death by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on July 14, 2020, becoming the first federal prisoner executed in 17 years. The Danny Lee execution was carried out over objections from the victims’ own family, the trial judge, and the lead prosecutor, and it opened a six-month stretch in which the federal government executed 12 more people. Lee was 47. He had spent more than two decades on federal death row for his part in the 1996 murders of an Arkansas family.

What Lee Was Convicted Of

In January 1996, Lee and Chevie Kehoe, the leader of a white supremacist group called the Aryan Peoples’ Republic, broke into the Tilly, Arkansas, home of William Mueller, a federal firearms licensee Kehoe knew from the gun-show circuit. Dressed as federal law enforcement, they waited for the family to return. When William and Nancy Mueller came home with Nancy’s eight-year-old daughter, Sarah Powell, the two men restrained them, used a stun gun to interrogate them about money and guns, and then suffocated all three with plastic bags and duct tape. They weighted the bodies with rocks and dumped them in Illinois Bayou near Lake Dardanelle. The remains were found on June 28, 1996.¹

Kehoe later estimated the take at about $80,000 in cash, gold, guns, and ammunition. Lee’s share came to between $3,000 and $4,000 and a pistol.¹ The two were arrested in 1997 and tried jointly in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas on federal racketeering charges, including three capital counts of murder in aid of racketeering. On May 4, 1999, a jury convicted both men on all counts.²

Why the Death Sentence Was Contested

The penalty phases were held separately. Kehoe went first, and the jury sentenced him to life in prison without release. After that, the U.S. Attorney on the case tried to withdraw the death notice against Lee. The Department of Justice in Washington refused.³ Line prosecutors had initially decided not to seek death against Lee at all; Main Justice overruled them.⁴ On May 14, 1999, the second jury sentenced Lee to death.

The split troubled the trial judge, U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Eisele, who viewed Kehoe as the ringleader. Eisele later wrote to then–Attorney General Eric Holder opposing Lee’s death sentence, calling the disparity inexplicable randomness.¹ The lead prosecutor, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Stripling, wrote his own letter to Holder in 2014 expressing similar concerns.⁵ During the penalty phase, the defense had presented evidence that Kehoe, not Lee, personally killed Sarah Powell after Lee refused.⁶

Lee’s convictions and sentence were affirmed by the Eighth Circuit in 2001, and his later habeas petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 was rejected, with the Eighth Circuit denying a certificate of appealability on his ineffective-assistance claims in 2012.⁷

The Victims’ Family Fought the Execution

Earlene Branch Peterson, Nancy Mueller’s mother and Sarah Powell’s grandmother, was 80 years old, conservative, and had voted for President Trump. In a 2019 video, she asked the president directly for clemency. “I can’t see how executing Daniel Lee will honor my daughter in any way,” she said. “In fact, it’s kinda like it dirties her name. Because she wouldn’t want it and I don’t want it.”⁸ Her surviving daughter, Kimma Gurel, and granddaughter, Monica Veillette, also wrote to the president asking for clemency.⁹

Peterson had once seen Lee as “the persona of evilness.” She came to believe executing the follower while the ringleader lived was unjust.⁵ When Attorney General William Barr said the government owed the execution to the victims’ families, Peterson answered publicly: “The government ain’t doing this for me, ’cause I would say no.”⁸

As the July 2020 date approached, Peterson, Gurel, and Veillette sued in the Southern District of Indiana to delay the execution, saying travel to a federal prison during the COVID-19 pandemic was dangerous for them. On July 10, 2020, the district court granted a preliminary injunction. Federal prosecutors moved to vacate it, describing the family’s health concerns as travel “preferences” and their lawsuit as “frivolous.” The Seventh Circuit vacated the injunction and the Supreme Court declined to intervene. The family was not present. They said they received no advance notice of the final timing. “We have spoken out that this is not something we wanted,” Veillette said afterward. “And in the end, they completely dismissed us.”¹⁰

The Lethal Injection Fight

Lee’s execution was also the test case for a new federal protocol. In July 2019, the Justice Department announced it would replace its previous three-drug procedure with a single large dose of pentobarbital sodium. Lee and other federal death row prisoners challenged the change on Eighth Amendment grounds, citing evidence that pentobarbital causes “flash pulmonary edema,” a lung-fluid buildup that they argued produces a drowning sensation while the person is still conscious.¹¹

On July 13, 2020, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington granted a preliminary injunction, finding the protocol likely to cause “extreme pain and needless suffering.” The D.C. Circuit declined to stay her order, saying the “novel and difficult constitutional questions” needed further factual development.¹¹ After 2:00 a.m. on July 14, the Supreme Court reversed both lower courts 5–4 in a per curiam opinion, holding that the prisoners had not shown a likelihood of success and noting that pentobarbital had been used in more than 100 state executions “without incident.”¹²

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, dissented, accusing the majority of accepting an “artificial claim of urgency.” Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Ginsburg, used his dissent to argue for reexamining the death penalty itself.¹³ Legal scholars later described Barr v. Lee as a significant expansion of the Court’s “shadow docket,” resolving a major constitutional question on an emergency schedule without full briefing.¹⁴

How the Execution Was Carried Out

Even after the Supreme Court cleared the path, a separate stay of execution issued by a federal court in Arkansas in December 2019 remained on the books. Lee’s attorney, Ruth Friedman of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, alerted the Bureau of Prisons. Federal prosecutors then filed emergency motions in the Eighth Circuit while Lee was already strapped to the gurney. He remained there for roughly four hours. The Eighth Circuit lifted the Arkansas stay at 6:36 a.m. Central time.¹⁵

The chamber curtain rose at 7:46 a.m. Eastern time. When a senior Bureau of Prisons official told Lee he was being put to death, he shook his head. According to the press pool report, his last words were: “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man.”¹⁶ He was pronounced dead at 8:07 a.m., 31 minutes after the final legal barrier fell.¹³

Friedman called the execution “shameful,” saying it was carried out during a pandemic, without defense counsel present, and while legal motions were still pending. The government, she said, “carried out this execution in haste, in the middle of the night, while the country was sleeping.”⁶ Attorney General Barr said the sentence was just: “The American people have made the considered choice to permit capital punishment for the most egregious federal crimes.”²

What Followed

Lee’s execution was the first of 13. Over the next six months, the federal government executed 12 more prisoners at Terre Haute, all with single-dose pentobarbital. Three took place in July 2020 alone (Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, and Dustin Lee Honken), and executions continued roughly every few weeks through January 2021. The final three occurred during the transition to President Biden, who had campaigned on ending the federal death penalty. Among them was Lisa Montgomery, the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953.¹⁷ The 13 executions were three times the total the federal government had carried out in the previous six decades combined.¹⁸

In July 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions to review the Trump-era protocols. President Biden kept the moratorium in place and, on December 23, 2024, commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 people then on federal death row to life without parole. Three were excluded: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dylann Roof, and Robert Bowers.¹⁹ The Trump administration has since moved to resume and expand federal executions, rescinding the Biden moratorium, readopting the pentobarbital protocol, and exploring additional methods including the firing squad.²⁰

Chevie Kehoe is still alive. He is serving life without the possibility of release.²¹

1
Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Daniel Lewis Lee
2
U.S. Department of Justice. Statement of Attorney General William P. Barr on the Execution of Daniel Lewis Lee
3
FindLaw. United States v. Lee
4
The Marshall Project. Daniel Lewis Lee
5
The New York Times. Arkansas Federal Death Penalty
6
Equal Justice Initiative. Federal Government Executes Daniel Lee Despite Opposition From Victims’ Family, Judges, and Prosecutor
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GovInfo. United States v. Daniel Lee
8
Equal Justice Initiative. Victims’ Family Opposes Federal Execution of Daniel Lee
9
Death Penalty Information Center. Victims’ Family Members Ask for Clemency for Federal Death Row Prisoner Daniel Lewis Lee
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Death Penalty Information Center. Victims’ Family Says They Were Retraumatized by Government’s Conduct During Federal Executions
11
U.S. Supreme Court. Barr v. Lee, Per Curiam
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FindLaw. Barr v. Lee
13
CNN. Daniel Lewis Lee Supreme Court Ruling and Execution
14
University of Chicago Law Review. Willfully Blind Machinery of Death: State Execution Challenges After Barr v. Lee
15
Death Penalty Information Center. Federal Government Ends Death Penalty Hiatus With Rushed Early Morning Execution of Daniel Lee
16
NPR. Federal Government Executes First Prisoner in 17 Years After Overnight Court Rulings
17
Bureau of Prisons. Federal Executions
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Brennan Center for Justice. Four Things to Know About the Federal Death Penalty
19
Tennessee Lookout. Biden Commutes Nearly All Federal Death Sentences
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U.S. Department of Justice. Justice Department Takes Actions to Strengthen Federal Death Penalty
21
FindLaw. United States v. Kehoe