Earlier this week, the Supreme Court did something it does very rarely.

It issued a major opinion, a life or death decision, at two in the morning.

Normally, when the Supreme Court issues a late-night order, it means that someone has been burning the candle on a dissent.

Mark Joseph Stern covers the Supreme Court for Slate.

He was waiting on this opinion.

And I think that's what happened here.

It looks like Justice Breyer and Justice Sotomayor both penned these dissents kind of at the last minute because the court did not have this

case on its docket until suddenly the defendant here or Daniel Lee was banging on the courthouse

door saying, please don't let them kill me. But a few hours after the Supreme Court's ruling,

Daniel Lee was executed.

Five out of the nine justices ruled the lethal injection that the federal government plan to administer was perfectly legal.

This decision was the culmination of months of planning on the part of the Justice Department, which had originally scheduled

lease execution for December. It fulfilled a Trump administration promise, no more waiting around

for prisoners on federal death row. And I think what the Trump administration and what Attorney

General Bill Barr have been trying to do here is just relentlessly rescheduling these

executions, almost like an office assistant who knows a meeting really has to happen and doesn't

want his boss to keep blowing it off, just like keeps throwing it on the calendar. And yes,

things intervene. And yes, it gets delayed. But if it just keeps going up there enough times, eventually it will

happen. That was Bill Barr's strategy, and as of Tuesday morning, it worked.

After the execution took place, William Barr released this statement, and he said,

today Lee finally faced the justice he deserved.

The American people have made the considered choice to permit capital punishment for the most egregious federal crimes.

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