TERRE HAUTE — The execution of a man convicted of two brutal killings in the 1990s has been halted by a federal judge in Washington, D.C.
Wesley Ira Purkey, 68, was scheduled to be executed Wednesday in Terre Haute, but U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed two injunctions prohibiting the act. The Justice Department appealed both cases.
Purkey was convicted of raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl in 1998. He also dismembered, burned, and dumped her body in a septic pond. He also was convicted in Missouri state court for using a claw hammer to bludgeon an 80-year-old woman who suffered from polio and walked with a cane.
Chutkan blocked the execution after Purkey’s attorneys claim he suffers from dementia and wouldn’t know why he is being executed.
“He has long accepted responsibility for the crime that put him on death row,” one of this lawyers, Rebecca Woodman, said via the Associated Press. “But as his dementia has progressed, he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him.”
In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled against executions when the person lacks an understanding of why it’s happening.
Daniel Lewis Lee was executed early Tuesday morning in Terre Haute. Lee, a member of a white supremacist group, was convicted of killing an Arkansas family in the 1990s.
