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Orlando Hall was executed Thursday night in Terre Haute, Indiana, after the Supreme Court dismissed a request to stop the execution. Hall, 49, is the eighth inmate to be executed by the federal government this year after a 17-year hiatus on executions.
He was sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder in 1994 of Lisa Rene, 16, a student on the honor roll with dreams of becoming a doctor. The United States Supreme Court sided with the Department of Justice in Hall’s execution.
Hall and several accomplices ran a marijuana smuggling operation in Arkansas in 1994, according to a Justice Department statement. After a failed $ 4,700 drug deal, they traveled to Texas to the home of the man they believed to have stolen their money.
The man’s sister, Lisa Rene, 16, was at the house and refused to let them in, the statement said. Although she had no connection to the drug deal, the men broke into the apartment, kidnapped her at gunpoint, and drove to an Arkansas motel. .
René was raped several times in the car and at the motel. When Hall realized she knew too much, the statement said, he and his accomplices took her to a park where they had dug a grave. They beat her with a shovel and then buried her alive, the statement said.
In 1995, a federal jury convicted Hall of kidnapping and murdering René and unanimously recommended a death sentence, according to the Justice Department’s statement. And all his subsequent appeals were dismissed.
According to Hall’s attorneys, he never denied his involvement in René’s murder and showed remorse after being sentenced to death. Lawyers say Hall was denied a fair trial due to a racist prosecutor barring black jurors from sitting and not receiving adequate legal assistance.
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