The US federal system has resumed executions after a 17 year hiatus, even if many states have not.
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| Lee, Purkey, and Honken - All Executed 2020. |
The reasons given in a statement were that "Under administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against the worst criminals. The Justice Department upholds the rule of law - and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system."
Since the resumption just five have been executed:
Daniel Lewis Lee: He was convicted of torturing and killing a family of three in Arkansas in 1996, dumping their bodies in a lake.
Wesley Ira Purkey: He was sentenced in Missouri in 2003 for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl whose body he dismembered, burnt and dumped in a septic pond. He was also convicted of using a claw hammer to batter 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales who had polio and used a cane to get around to death, in a separate state court case.
Dustin Lee Honken: He was sentenced with his wife in Iowa in 2004 for shooting dead five people including two girls aged six and 10 to stop them testifying in a drug case against them.
Keith Dwayne Nelson: He was sentenced in Missouri in 2001 for the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl behind a church.
Christopher Andre Vialva: He killed two youth ministers, Iowa pastor Todd Bagley and his wife Stacey Bagley in Fort Hood, Texas in 1999. He and an accomplice car-jacked the couple, robbed them, kept them in the trunk, shot both of the victims in the head and burnt the bodies in their car.
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| Nelson, Vialva, And Soon Montgomery Also Executed 2020. |
But this band are soon to be followed by Lisa Montgomery who is due to be executed in federal prison in Indiana on 8 December 2020.
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| Bonnie Heady And Carl Hall |
The last woman executed by the federal government was Bonnie Heady, who died in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953.
In 2004, Montgomery drove from Kansas to the home of Bobbie Jo Stinnett (who was eight months pregnant), in Missouri, purportedly to purchase a puppy. She then strangled the pregnant Stinnett into unconsciousness before attempting to cut out her unborn child. Ms Stinnett regained consciousness and Montgomery strangled her again, this time to death and then cut out the child and kidnapped the baby, passing it off as her own. The child was later safely recovered by authorities.
Interestingly, since all the Black Live Matters protests, just one of the state executions has been an Afro/American male, although at least one more is scheduled for a December 2020 execution ..... you'll have to make up your own minds as to why that may be in an election year, as I couldn't possibly comment.
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