A white supremacist convicted of torturing and killing a family of three people in 1996 has been executed early Tuesday to become the first federal death row inmate to be put to death since 2003.
Daniel Lewis Lee, 47, was brought into the death chamber in a wheelchair. Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary officials strapped him into a gurney, covered his body with a blue blanket, and began the lethal injection procedure.
“I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murder,” Lee said while looking at the media witness room. “You’re killing an innocent man.”
Lee was convicted of killing gun-dealer William Frederick Mueller, his wife, and stepdaughter after torturing them with a stun gun, putting their heads in duct-taped trash bags and throwing them into the Illinois bayou.
