Early last week, the Supreme Court ruled that federal executions, which have not occurred since 2003, will be allowed to resume. One of those slated for execution is an Iowa man, who was sentenced to death by lethal injection in October of 2005 for the murders of five people, including two children. The now 52-year-old Dustin Lee Honken of Britt was a reported drug dealer convicted in 2004 of the 1993 slayings of two dealers turned federal drug informants, Greg Nicholson of Mason City and Terry DeGues of Britt along with Nicholson’s girlfriend, Lori Duncan, and her two daughters, ten-year-old Kandi and six-year-old Amber, all of Mason City. Their bodies were found in 2000, after Honken’s girlfriend, Angela Johnson, who was also arrested for her involvement in the murders, drew a map pointing to the location of the graves and presented it to a jailhouse informant she believed would help her pin the crimes on someone else. Honken is scheduled to die on Friday, July 17, but Iowa Bishops, including R. Walker Nickless, Bishop of the Sioux City Diocese, have banded together in an appeal for a commutation. “It is a duty of the state to punish offenders and defend the common good and this would still be accomplished by commuting his sentence,” they wrote to President Donald Trump. “It is our concern that the death penalty contributes to a growing disrespect for the sacredness of all human life. We believe that state-sanctioned killing would not deter or end violence, but instead perpetuate a cycle of violence.”
