The country’s sole Native American on federal death row is scheduled to be executed next month, the Department of Justice announced.
Lezmond Mitchell, a Navajo man convicted in the 2001 murder of a Navajo woman and her 9-year-old granddaughter, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Aug. 26 at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terra Haute, Indiana, where he’s currently housed.
Mitchell’s execution was originally set for December, but an appeals court entered a stay of execution as it resolved an additional appeal by Mitchell that was later unanimously rejected in April. His request for a “full-court rehearing” was also denied earlier this month, Department of Justice officials said Wednesday.
“When the Ninth Circuit stay formally concludes, no legal impediments will bar the execution, and it can occur without further delay,” department officials said in a statement.
Federal prosecutors said Mitchell killed Alyce Slim, 63, and her granddaughter in October 2001 during a carjacking in Arizona.
Mitchell and an accomplice stabbed Slim 33 times and tossed her body into the backseat of her car beside her granddaughter after getting a ride from Slim in her pickup truck, federal prosecutors said.
He then drove the truck up to 40 miles away and ordered the girl to “lay down and die” before slitting her throat and crushing her head with rocks. Mitchell and his accomplice then cut the head and hands off the victims’ bodies and burned their clothes, according to the US government.
The bodies were found in a shallow grave on the Navajo Nation, prosecutors said.
A jury in Arizona later found Mitchell guilty of first-degree murder, felony murder and carjacking resulting in death before he was sentenced to death.
Mitchell’s accomplice, Johnny Orsinger, who was a minor at the time, was also convicted and was sentenced to life in prison, UPI reports.
Wednesday’s announcement follows Attorney General William Barr’s order last July directing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to execute five death-row inmates — including Mitchell –convicted of heinous crimes against children and the elderly.
Mitchell is set to be executed in the same week as Keith Dwayne Nelson, who was convicted of kidnapping and raping a 10-year-old girl in Kansas before strangling her in 1999.
Three other federal inmates convicted of killing children — Dustin Honken, Wesley Purkey and Daniel Lewis Lee — were executed earlier this month.
Tribal officials and even the victim’s family oppose Mitchell’s execution, while his attorneys claim the planned executions “demonstrates the ultimate disrespect for the Navajo Nation’s values and sovereignty.”
The Federal Death Penalty Act prohibits executions for crimes committed on tribal land, UPI reports. But Mitchell’s attorney said in a statement that the government used a “loophole” to charge with a lesser crime — carjacking resulting in death — to seek the death penalty without tribal approval.
If the execution proceeds as scheduled, Mitchell would be the first Native American executed by the federal government in the modern era, UPI reports, citing his attorneys.
With Post wires