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Federal authorities of U.S carried out this Saturday their thirteenth and last execution in six months, according to local media, four days after the Republican president Donald trump hand over power to the democrat Joe Biden.
Dustin Higgs, a 48-year-old African-American, received a lethal injection at Terre-Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana, The New York Times reported.
“The condemned man was declared dead,” the New York newspaper said, citing a statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
One night in January 1996, Higgs invited three young women to his apartment near Washington with two friends. After one of the girls rejected his advances, he offered to drive them home, but instead stopped at a federal nature reserve.
According to the Department of Justice, in that isolated place ordered one of his friends to shoot the three women.
In 2000, was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murder. The perpetrator was sentenced to life imprisonment.
“It is arbitrary and unfair to punish Mr. Higgs more than the murderer,” said his attorney, Shawn Nolan, in a clemency request addressed to Trump in late December.
But the Republican president, a staunch defender of the death penalty, did not agree. On the contrary, his administration went to court to be able to carry out the execution before he left the White House next Wednesday.
A court had ordered the postponement of the execution Tuesday alleging that Higgs had contracted covid-19 and that her disease-affected lungs were likely to be in severe pain at the time of the pentobarbital injection.
The Justice Department appealed that decision immediately and won the case.
The Supreme Court rejected a last resort related to jurisdictional issues. The high court now has six conservative judges among its nine members, three of them appointed by Trump. Since the summer, he has consistently given his go-ahead to federal executions.
An unprecedented series
The Republican administration resumed this practice suspended for 17 years, while states postponed all executions to prevent the spread of the virus.
Since then, 12 people have received lethal injections in Terre-Haute, including, for the first time in almost 70 years, a woman, who was executed Tuesday despite doubts about her mental health.
“There have never been so many federal executions in such a short time,” says Richard Dunham, the director of the Washington-based Center for Information on the Death Penalty. “The highest number of civilians executed by federal authorities was 16 in 1896,” compared to 13 in the last six months.
With the Higgs execution, six convicts suffered capital punishment since Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election on Nov. 3, an unprecedented event, Dunham adds.
“Historically, presidents who end their terms focus on pardons and commutations of sentences,” he recalls. Before Trump, no outgoing president “used his discretionary power to kill people instead of pardoning them.”
According to the expert, the profile of those convicted reflects recurring problems in the application of the death penalty in the United States, with an over-representation of African Americans (seven of the 13). Further, two of those executed had serious intellectual deficiencies, two suffered from mental problems and two had just reached the age of majority at the time of their crime.
Biden, who will be sworn in as the new president on Wednesday, opposes the death penalty and he has promised to work with Congress to try to abolish it at the federal level.
Democratic congressmen presented a bill to this effect on Monday, which has a chance of being approved as the party regained control of the Senate.
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