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Supreme Court Clears Way for Second Federal Execution in Two Decades

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Convicted child rapist and murderer Wesley Purkey was put to death on Thursday morning, over half a day after his execution was scheduled thanks to…
Convicted child rapist and murderer Wesley Purkey was put to death on Thursday morning, over half a day after his execution was scheduled thanks to what one judge called the “procedural gamesmanship” of his legal counsel.
In an opinion issued in the early hours of the morning for the second time this week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voided the stays imposed on Purkey’s execution by an Obama-appointed U. S. District Court judge, Tanya Chutkan, who has played a thorn in the side of the Trump Administration since it began its efforts to restart the federal death penalty last year.
Indiana District Court Judge James R. Sweeney II then denied another appeal by Purkey’s lawyers, writing in a brief opinion that Purkey’s decision to file first in the District of Columbia before an apparently sympathetic judge—what Sweeney called a “calculated forum choice”—allowed him to artificially delay the carrying out of his sentence through an “abuse of the writ” of habeas corpus.
This back-and-forth typifies the heated debate in the federal judiciary, and within national politics, over the death penalty. As both Purkey’s death and the execution of white supremacist and convicted murderer Daniel Lewis Lee on Tuesday show, capital cases now drag on for decades—and often come to an end amid a flurry of last-minute filings, designed, depending on one’s view, either to ensure justice or unjustly delay it.
Purkey’s double appeal “violates the principle that ‘we ought not to have a procedural system where challenges to a conviction go on endlessly,'” Sweeney wrote, citing the dissenting opinion of Justice Stephen Breyer in the Supreme Court’s vacatur—a line Breyer had used in arguing that the interminable procedural shenanigans characteristic of modern death penalty defense were in fact reason for an end to the practice of capital punishment.

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