IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A federal judge has denied an Iowa drug kingpin’s requests to delay his execution, which is scheduled for Friday.
U.S. District Judge Leonard Strand wrote Tuesday that he would not intervene to delay Dustin Honken’s execution date due to the coronavirus pandemic.
He said the Bureau of Prisons was in the best position to weigh the health risks against the benefits of carrying out the execution.
Strand also denied Honken’s motion to declare his execution void due to an alleged procedural error by the government.
He affirmed the executive branch’s power to set the date for executions.
Honken, formerly of Britt, was sentenced to death by lethal injection in October of 2005 for the murders of three adults and two children in 1993.
The bodies of two drug dealers turned federal informants, Greg Nicholson of Mason City and Terry DeGues of Britt, along with the bodies of Nicholson’s girlfriend, Lori Duncan, and her two daughters, ten-year-old Kandi and six-year-old Amber, all of Mason City, were found in 2000 in shallow graves near Mason City.
Honken’s girlfriend, Angela Johnson, also received a federal death sentence for her role in the murders. She provided a map of the burial sites to a prison informant, believing they would help her pin the murders on someone else. Her death sentence was reversed in 2014 and Johnson was instead sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
