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The United States Government today proceeded with the thirteenth and last execution at the federal level during the presidency. Donald trump, a few days before the inauguration of president-elect Joe Biden, who has promised to try to abolish the death penalty.
Dustin Higgs, 48, was pronounced dead at 1:23 pm local time (08:23 GMT), the Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement.
Five hours after the decision to execute him, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court of U.S paved the way for lethal injection, rejecting a ban order from a federal appeals court.
Higgs was sentenced to death in 2001 for overseeing the 1996 abduction and murder of three women at a federal wildlife sanctuary in Maryland: Tanjil Jackson, Tamika Black and Misan Chin.
In his last words, Higgs sounded calm, according to a journalist who witnessed the execution by the media.
“I would like to say that I am innocent,” he said, referring to the three women by name. “I did not order the murders.”
The Justice Department executed him with lethal injections of pentobarbarital, a powerful barbiturate, in the death chamber of the prison where he was being held, in Ter Ot, Indiana, according to Reuters and Agence France-Presse and the Athens News Agency.
“The government completed the unprecedented massacre of 13 people tonight, killing Dustin Higgs, a black man who never killed anyone, on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Nolan, one of Higgs’s attorneys, said in a statement.
“Dustin spent decades on the wing future deaths in solitary confinement helping others around him, while working tirelessly against his unjust sentence. “
The Supreme Court ruling is in line with previous rulings: it had rejected all lower-level court orders for delayed federal executions, which were repeated last year.
“This is not justice,” wrote judge Sonia Sotomayor, who disagreed with the ruling. “After waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the government had to exercise restraint to make sure it did it legally. Since it didn’t do it, the court had to. It didn’t.”
The federal government executed 10 people last year, more than three times in the last six decades – the first time it has executed more executions of all US states combined, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. A minority of the country’s 50 states are still running.
Higgs was the 13th man to be executed by the United States government in a series of executions started last summer by Trump, a Republican, after a 17-year hiatus at the federal level. Since 1963, only three people have been executed by the federal government before Trump.
After a failed triple date with the three women, Higgs and his partner Willy Haynes suggested that they take them home, but instead took them to the Patuxent Research Shelter. According to prosecutors, Higgs handed the gun to Haynes and told him to shoot the three women.
Hines, who confessed to the shooting, was sentenced to life in prison, while Higgs was sentenced to death in a separate trial, a dispute that his attorneys said paved the way for leniency.
Higgs and another death row inmate, Corey Johnson, were diagnosed with COVID-19 in December, but on Wednesday the Supreme Court rejected an order from a federal judge in Washington to delay their executions for a few weeks to cure them. The Justice Department executed Johnson the day before yesterday, Thursday night.
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