TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — A Kansas girl’s killer on Friday became the fifth federal inmate put to death this year, an execution that went forward only after a higher court tossed a ruling that would have required the government to get a prescription for the drug used to kill him.
Questions about whether the drug pentobarbital causes pain prior to death had been a focus of appeals for Keith Nelson, 45, the second inmate executed this week in the Trump administration’s resumption of federal executions this summer after a 17-year hiatus.
The Bureau of Prisons gave the time of Nelson’s death inside a death chamber at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, as 4:32 p.m. EDT.
When a prison official standing over him asked if he had any last words, he was met with silence. Nelson didn’t utter a word, grunt or nod his head. After the official waited for about 15 seconds, his eyes fixed on Nelson waiting in vain for an answer, the official turned away and began the execution procedure. He was pronounced dead about nine minutes after the lethal injection began.
Nelson, whose face was entirely obscured behind a medical mask and a blue sheet across his body, stayed still as the officials began administering the lethal injection of pentobarbital, the drug his attorneys made as the focus of their last-minute appeals. None of his limbs twitched or quivered, but after about a minute his chest and midsection began to heave and shutter involuntarily.
Nelson was convicted of grabbing 10-year-old Pamela Butler off the street and throwing her into his truck in broad daylight on Oct. 12, 1999, as part of a plan to find a female to kidnap, torture, rape and kill because he expected to go back to prison anyway.
The girl had been returning to her Kansas City, Kansas, home on inline skates after buying cookies. As he drove off with her, he made a rude gesture to her sister, who saw the attack and screamed. He later raped the fifth-grader and strangled her with a wire.
Nelson, like the other federal inmates executed this year, received a lethal injection of pentobarbital, which depresses the central nervous system and eventually stops the heart.
Nelson’s attorneys said they had come to know him as someone other than a killer, that they “saw his humanity, his compassion, and his sense of humor.”
“The execution of Keith Nelson did not make the world a safer place,” the lawyers, Dale Baich and Jen Moreno, said in a statement. “Keith’s death sentence was the result of a proceeding that denied him constitutionally guaranteed protections and reveals another deep flaw in the federal death penalty system.”
Nelson’s spiritual adviser, Sister Barbara Battista, stood near Nelson’s inside the death chamber. She spoke to the 45-year-old Nelson regularly since last month, and last talked to him by phone Wednesday, saying he sounded more subdued than usual but not frightened.
“His parting words were … ‘I don’t want to see you on Friday but I probably will,’” she said in an interview Friday. “He would rather be alive after Friday. But he is facing the reality.”
A flurry of filings by Nelson’s legal team over several weeks zeroed in on pentobarbital, which depresses the central nervous system and, in high doses, eventually stops the heart.
In one filing in early August, Nelson’s attorneys cited an unofficial autopsy on one inmate executed last month, William Purkey, saying it indicated evidence of pulmonary edema in which the lungs fill with fluid and causes a painful sensation akin to drowning.
In her now-overturned ruling, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan halted Nelson’s execution early Thursday, saying laws regulating drugs require the prescriptions, even for executions.
Within hours a panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out Chutkan’s order with little explanation.
Nelson’s crime was horrific by any measure.
Butler, a fifth-grade student, had been returning to her Kansas City, Kansas, home on inline skates after buying cookies at a store. As he drove off, Nelson made a rude gesture to Butler’s sister, who saw the attack and screamed.
Nelson, who didn’t previously know Butler or her family, told a co-worker a month earlier he planned to find a female to kidnap, torture, rape and kill because he expected to go back to prison anyway on other charges, prosecutors said.
After raping Butler, Nelson strangled her with a wire, then dumped her body in a wooded area near a Missouri church.
In a 2018 ruling, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Nelson showed no remorse during a sentencing hearing statement and instead “blistered the district court and the victim’s family with a profanity laden tirade.”
Butler’s mother, Cherri West, hoped Nelson’s execution would bring her some peace after living for decades with the torment of her daughter’s final hours.
“To know that that was the last face that she saw on this earth … and having to know how scared she was and what he was doing to her, has literally eaten me up,”she said.
With the execution Wednesday of Lezmond Mitchell — the only Native American on federal death row — the federal government under President Donald Trump registered more executions in 2020 than it had in the previous 56 years combined.
The executions of Nelson and Mitchell were carried out the same week as the Republican National Convention, where many Trump supporters sought to portray him as a law-and-order candidate.
Nelson’s current attorneys said Nelson’s lawyers during the 2001 penalty phase of his case should have emphasized mitigating evidence, including that Nelson suffered brain damage as a newborn and was abused as a child.
During arguments, prosecutors pointed to Nelson’s twin brother, saying he grew up in similarly difficult circumstances but had a good job and had done well.
Government attorneys have defended the use of pentobarbital, disputing that Purkey’s autopsy proved he suffered. They have also cited Supreme Court ruling precedent that an execution method isn’t necessarily cruel and unusual just because it causes some pain.
Pentobarbital has few medical uses for humans, though it is often used by veterinarians to euthanize animals.
Three federal executions in the early 2000s deployed a cocktail of three drugs: sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.
But after makers of those drugs objected to their use in executions, states and the federal government scrambled for alternatives. Attorney General William Barr last year approved reworked execution protocols that called for using pentobarbital alone.
