US murderer Daniel Lewis Lee has been put to death, hours after the Supreme Court allowed the first executions of federal inmates in 17 years.
The 47-year-old, of Yukon, Oklahoma, died by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
"I didn't do it," Lee said just before he was executed. "I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I'm not a murderer... You're killing an innocent man."
Lee was convicted in Arkansas of the 1996 killings of gun dealer William Mueller, his wife, Nancy, and her eight-year-old daughter.
The court heard that after robbing and shooting the victims, Lee threw the bodies into the Illinois bayou.
The execution was delayed after Judge Tanya Chutkan of the district court in Washington DC issued an injunction. The Supreme Court then voted to reverse lower court rulings that blocked Lee’s execution and others.
The decision to move forward with the execution - the first by the Bureau of Prisons since 2003 - drew scrutiny from civil rights groups and the relatives of Lee's victims, who had sued to try to halt it, citing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.
Relatives have long argued that Lee deserved a life sentence in prison. They highlighted that Lee's co-defendant, Chevie Kehoe, received a life sentence.
"Yes, Daniel Lee damaged my life, but I can't believe taking his life is going to change any of that," Earlene Peterson, 81, whose daughter Nancy was killed by Lee, said in a video statement last year.
Critics have also argued that the Government was creating an unnecessary and manufactured urgency for political gain.
Though there had not been a federal execution since 2003, the Justice Department has continued to approve death penalty prosecutions and federal courts have sentenced defendants to death.
In 2014, following a botched state execution in Oklahoma, President Barack Obama directed the Justice Department to conduct a broad review of capital punishment and issues surrounding lethal injection drugs.
Last July, the attorney general said the review had been completed, clearing the way for executions to resume. He approved a new procedure for lethal injections which replaced the three-drug combination previously used in federal executions with one drug, pentobarbital.
This is similar to the procedure used in several states, including Georgia, Missouri and Texas.
Numbers of state executions have fallen steadily since the last federal execution, according to data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center.
States put to death 59 people in 2004 and 22 in 2019, nine of which were in Texas.
