TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — A Kansas girl’s killer 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.
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 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.”
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.
