Stay of Execution.

Byline: Derek Hawkins

7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Daniel Lewis Lee v. T.J. Watson, Warden, et al.,

Case No.: 20-2128

Officials: SYKES, Chief Judge, and EASTERBROOK and BARRETT, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Stay of Execution

Daniel Lewis Lee and his codefendant, Chevy Kehoe, were members of the Aryan Peoples' Republic (a/k/a Aryan Peoples' Resistance), a white supremacist organization founded for the purpose of establishing an independent nation of white supremacists in the Pacific Northwest. In January 1996 Lee and Kehoe traveled from the State of Washington to the Arkansas home of William Mueller, a firearms dealer who owned a large collection of guns and ammunition. There they overpowered Mueller and his wife, Nancy, and questioned their eight-year-old daughter Sarah about the location of Mueller's guns, ammunition, and cash. After stealing about $30,000 worth of weapons and $50,000 in cash and coins, Lee and Kehoe shot all three victims with a stun gun, placed plastic bags over their heads, and sealed the bags with duct tape to asphyxiate them. They then taped rocks to the three victims and threw them into the Illinois Bayou. The bodies were discovered six months later in Lake Darnelle near Russellville, Arkansas. United States v. Lee, 374 F.3d 637, 642 (8th Cir. 2004).

Lee and Kehoe were indicted in federal court in the Eastern District of Arkansas on three counts of capital murder in aid of racketeering, 18 U.S.C. 1959(a)(1), and related crimes. The Eighth Circuit affirmed Lee's convictions and death sentence. 374 F.3d 637 (8th Cir. 2004); 274 F.3d 485 (8th Cir. 2001). In July 2019 the United States scheduled Lee's execution for December 9, 2019. Two months later he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. 2241 in the Southern District of Indiana, where he is confined in the Terre Haute federal prison. He requested a stay of execution but later withdrew that request. The district judge nonetheless stayed Lee's execution. We vacated the stay order because 2255(e) bars a 2241 petition with a limited exception for claims for which a motion under 2255 is "inadequate or ineffective to test the validity of" the prisoner's detention; the exception is customarily referred to as the "Savings Clause." Lee's 2241 petition raised two challenges to his death sentence: a Strickland claim1 for ineffective assistance of trial counsel during the sentencing phase and a Brady/Napue claim based on evidence that was supposedly...