US drug kingpin who killed 5 people to be executed
Published:Friday | July 17, 2020 | 11:09 AM
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A ruthless Iowa meth kingpin who killed five people, including two young girls, in 1993 to thwart his prosecution for drug trafficking is set to become the third federal inmate to be executed this week.
Dustin Honken, 52, would become the first defendant in an Iowa case to be put to death since 1963 if he is executed as scheduled on Friday.
Iowa abolished the death penalty in 1965, but federal prosecutors sought to execute Honken for killing government informants and children.
Honken is set to die by lethal injection at the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he’s been on death row since 2005 and two other men have been put to death since Tuesday after a 17-year hiatus in federal executions.
“He does deserve what he’s getting. I can tell you that. He deserved it a long time ago,” said Susan Torres, 54, who plans to attend the execution with other victims’ relatives.
Honken’s lawyers filed an emergency request to stay the execution Thursday. A judge didn’t immediately rule on the request, which claims the execution protocol is arbitrary and capricious.
Torres, who lives in Des Moines, Iowa, was Lori Duncan’s sister-in-law before her brother and Duncan split up and she was an aunt to Duncan’s daughters, 10-year-old Kandi and 6-year-old Amber. Duncan, her new boyfriend, Greg Nicholson, and her daughters were kidnapped and killed by Honken and his girlfriend in 1993, which was seven years before their bodies were found.
Mark Bennett, the federal judge who oversaw Honken’s trial, said he generally opposes the death penalty, but that if anyone deserved to be executed, it was Honken.
He said Honken’s crimes were reprehensible and that Honken had a fair legal process, including talented lawyers who “did an outstanding job with virtually nothing to work with.”
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