Earlene Branch Peterson lost her daughter Nancy and granddaughter Sarah in the crime that put Daniel Lewis Lee on federal death row. Mrs. Peterson and other family members are now speaking out against Mr. Lee’s scheduled execution and asking President Trump to commute his sentence.
In a new video, featured in The New York Times article “Before First Federal Execution in Years, Family of Victims Dissents” by Campbell Robertson, Mrs. Peterson explains why executing Mr. Lee would not offer her relief or closure: “I can’t see how executing Danny Lee would honor my daughter in any way because she wouldn’t want it and I don’t want it.” Mrs. Peterson also believes it is unfair that Mr. Lee is facing execution while his more culpable co-defendant received a life sentence.
According to the New York Times, Mrs. Peterson isn’t the only family member opposed to the scheduled execution:
“Mrs. Peterson is hardly alone in her belief that Mr. Lee should be spared. Her surviving daughter, Kimma Gurel, who sat beside her every excruciating day of the six-week trial, strongly agrees. So does her granddaughter, Monica Veillette, who has for years been pleading with officials to change Mr. Lee’s sentence.”
Even the lead prosecutor in the trial and the federal judge who oversaw the trial have expressed concerns that the decision to put Mr. Lee to death was arbitrary and unfair. As the Times reports:
The lead prosecutor in the trial, former Assistant United States Attorney Dan Stripling, wrote in a 2014 letter to Eric H. Holder Jr., who was then the attorney general, that though he believed in capital punishment, he was disturbed by the randomness of its imposition. Mr. Lee’s death sentence, he wrote, “perfectly illustrates this inexplicable randomness.”
The federal judge who oversaw the trial — G. Thomas Eisele, a Nixon appointee to the bench who died two years ago — wrote in a 2015 letter to Mr. Holder that he had second-guessed his decisions ever since and was left “with the firm conviction that justice was not served in this particular case, solely with regard to the sentence of death imposed on Daniel Lewis Lee.”
On July 25, 2019, when Attorney General William P. Barr announced the federal government’s plan to execute Mr. Lee, he claimed “we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” But in this case, the victim’s family members do not want this execution to happen.
You can watch a video here of Mrs. Peterson urging President Trump to not let the execution of Danny Lee go forward:
https://vimeo.com/368134449
Hopefully, Mrs. Peterson’s moving plea for mercy will be heard and Danny Lee will be spared from execution.