The United States government executed Dustin Honken, a drug trafficker sentenced to death for murdering five people, including two girls, in the early 1990s on Friday.
Honken, 52, was pronounced dead at 4:36 p.m. (20:36 GMT) after receiving a lethal injection at Terre Haute, Indiana, the Federal Prison Agency (BOP) reported. ).
Honken’s was the third execution in a week ordered by the Donald Trump government, the first in nearly two decades in the federal system.
Unlike the previous two, scheduled for Monday and Wednesday afternoons and occurred on Tuesday and Thursday morning after hours of litigation between lawyers, prosecutors and judges, the courts did not intervene this Friday to suspend the Honken one.
In the early 1990s, Honken dropped out of Chemistry in Iowa to use his knowledge to set up a Methamphetamine Laboratory in Arizona.
Greg Nicholson and Terry DeGeus, who would later be two of his five victims, were his trusted men and those in charge of distributing the drug in Iowa.
Honken’s criminal journey was short, as federal authorities quickly detected his activities and Nicholson agreed to assist in the investigation.
In July 1993, Honken had been detained and released on bail pending trial.
It was then that he took advantage, along with his then girlfriend, Angela Johnson, to get rid of his collaborators so that they could not testify during the trial.
First they killed Nicholson, her partner, Lori Duncan, and her daughters, Kandance, 6, and Amber, 10. Then they did the same with DeGeus.
The bodies were not found until 2000, when Johnson admitted to an informant in jail about where they were buried. Both she and Honken were serving sentences for drug offenses at the time.
In 2005 they were both sentenced to death, although Johnson’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Although Honken did not take advantage of his last words on Friday to apologize to the families of his victims, a common among prisoners sentenced to death before being executed, his lawyer, Shawn Nolan, said he was a “redeemed” man.
“There was no reason for the government to kill him. The Dustin Honken they wanted to kill disappeared long ago. The man they killed today was a human being, who could have spent the rest of his days helping others and redeeming himself even more.” said.
Trump showed interest in restarting federal executions after arriving at the White House three and a half years ago, but has been unable to do so until now due to judicial impediments. More executions are expected to be scheduled in the coming months.
Honken’s was the tenth execution of the year in the United States, three federal and seven state. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty four decades ago, 1,522 prisoners have been executed in the United States, just six of them at the hands of the federal government.
The Executive has scheduled a new execution for August 28, that of Keith Nelson, sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of a 10-year-old girl in 1999.
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