Last Updated on August 27, 2020, 5:39 AM AST by Anthony Morris
The US is set to execute Lezmond Mitchell, who is the only Native American on federal death row and a convicted murderer on Wednesday, despite opposition from the Navajo Nation, which has said that the government is infringing the tribal sovereignty.
Mitchell, a Navajo, would be killed by injections of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate which is lethal, at 6 pm (20:00 GMT) in the execution chamber of the Department of Justice in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Jonathan Nez, the Navajo Nation president and Mitchell’s lawyers, have asked the US President for clemency, and Mitchell has urged the US District Court in Washington, DC to delay his execution while the petition is considered.
The US Supreme Court had rejected Mitchell’s bid for a stay on Tuesday, which was based on his lawyers’ argument that racial bias could have tainted the jury in the trial.
Absent intervention, 38-year-old Mitchell would become the fourth person to be executed by the US government this summer after an informal hiatus of 17 years, which was caused in part difficulties obtaining deadly drugs and by legal challenges to lethal injection protocols.
The Death Penalty Information Center said that eight states had executed a total of 16 Native Americans since 1976.
Mitchell and Johnny Oslinger, his accomplice, was convicted of murdering Tiffany Lee, a nine-year-old Navajo girl, and Alyce Slim, her grandmother in 2001 on the tribe’s territory, which spans four states in the US Southwest.
According to prosecutors, they stabbed Slim over 30 times and put her body in the backseat of her car alongside her granddaughter as they drove elsewhere before they killed the girl later and decapitated both bodies.
After the objection of Navajo officials, Mitchell was sentenced to death in an Arizona federal court, and the officials said that the tribe’s cultural values prohibit taking human life “for vengeance”.
Around 13 other tribes joined the Navajo Nation in requesting Trump this month to commute Mitchell’s death sentence to life in prison.
Oslinger was a teenager at the time of the offence and ineligible for the death sentence.
Anthony Morris covers stories related to politics and regional developments. His in-depth reporting about governance and reforms makes him stand out in regional journalism, with a deep analysis of political trends and their impact on Caribbean communities.
