CHICAGO (AP) — When the U.S. prisons director visited the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, this past week, she stopped by the federal death row where Bruce Webster is in a solitary, 12-by-7 foot cell, 23 hours a day.
Webster’s not supposed to be there. A federal judge in Indiana ruled in 2019 that the 49-year-old has an IQ in the range of severe intellectual disability and so cannot be put to death.
But four years on, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Prisons haven’t moved him to a less restrictive unit or different prison.
Why? His own lawyer, who secured a rare legal win in persuading a court to vacate Webster’s 1996 death sentence in the kidnapping, rape and killing of a 16-year-old Texas girl, says she’s baffled.
“How can I not get this guy off death row?,” an exasperated Monica Foster said in a recent interview. “Well, I did get him off death row. But why can’t I physically get him off death row?”
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