TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — Keith Dwayne Nelson, convicted of killing a Kansas girl more than two decades ago, was executed Friday in Indiana, becoming the fifth federal inmate put to death this year.
Nelson, 45, was executed by lethal injection at 4:32 p.m. at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, the Tribune-Star reported. The execution began nine minutes earlier, after Nelson made no statement before being strapped onto a gurney and receiving a lethal dose of pentobarbital, the newspaper reported.
Nelson’s execution came two days after the execution of 38-year-old Lezmond Mitchell, the only Native American on federal death row.
Nelson was convicted in the October 1999 kidnapping and murder of a 10-year-old girl who was rollerblading in front of her home in Kansas City, Kansas.
In March 2002, Nelson was sentenced to death after pleading guilty to the 1999 kidnapping, rape and murder of a 10-year-old Kansas home, the Tribune-Star reported. Nelson admitted to taking Pamela Butler, who was rollerblading in front of her Kansas home to a forest behind a Missouri church, where he raped and strangled her with a wire, according to The Associated Press.
The Justice Department reinstated federal executions in July after a 17-year hiatus, CNN reported. Inmates Dustin Honken, Wesley Purkey and Daniel Lewis Lee were executed last month, the Tribune-Star reported.
Nelson’s attorneys, Dale Baich and Jen Moreno, filed several last-minute legal challenges to the execution, arguing that the use of pentobarbital violated the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act, according to CNN. An appeals court in Washington, D.C., eventually ruled that the execution should move forward, the network reported.
The attorneys did not appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
Baich and Moreno told reporters that “the execution of Keith Nelson did not make the world a safer place.”
“Over the years, we have come to know Keith as someone who was different than the person who committed the horrible crime to which he admitted and pled guilty to in 2001,” the attorneys said. “We saw his humanity, his compassion, and his sense of humor.”
The Department of Justice has scheduled two executions for September, the Tribune-Star reported. William Emmett LeCroy is to be executed Sept. 22, and Christopher Andre Vialva is to be executed Sept. 24, the newspaper reported.
LeCroy was convicted in the rape and murder of a 30-year-old nurse in 2001, the Tribune-Star reported. Vialva was convicted in the homicide of youth ministers Todd and Stacie Bagley in 1999.
Cox Media Group
