Trump administration carries out 13th and final execution

The Trump administration carried out its 13th federal execution since July on Friday, an unprecedented run that ended just five days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty.

Dustin Higgs, convicted of the 1996 murder of three women at a Maryland wildlife refuge, was the third to receive a lethal injection this week at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department resumed federal executions last year after a 17-year hiatus. No president in more than 120 years had overseen so many federal executions.

Higgs, 48, was pronounced dead at 1:23 am In his closing statement, Higgs was calm but defiant, mentioning the victims by name.

“I would like to say that I am an innocent man,” he said. “I did not order the murders.”

The loud sobs of a woman crying inconsolably echoed for several minutes in a room reserved for the Higgs family as her eyes rolled, showing the whites of her eyes before completely stopping moving.

The number of federal death sentences carried out under Trump since 2020 is more than in the previous 56 years combined, reducing the number of inmates on federal death row by nearly a quarter. None of the remaining 50 men are likely to be executed any time soon, with Biden signaling that he will end federal executions.

The only woman on death row, Lisa Montgomery, was executed Wednesday for killing a pregnant woman, then removing the baby from her womb and claiming it as her own. She was the first woman to be executed in almost 70 years.

The federal executions began when the coronavirus pandemic swept through prisons across the country. Among the prisoners who received Covid-19 last month were Higgs and former drug dealer Corey Johnson, who was executed on Thursday. Some members of the enforcement teams have also previously tested positive for the virus.

Since the last days of Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the late 1800s, the U.S. government has not executed federal prisoners during a presidential transition, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Cleveland’s was also the last presidency during which the number of civilians executed at the federal level was in double digits in one year, 1896, during Cleveland’s second term.

In October 2000, a federal jury in Maryland convicted Higgs of first degree murder and kidnapping in the murders of 19-year-old Tamika Black; Mishann Chinn. 2. 3; and Tanji Jackson, 21. His death sentence was the first imposed in the modern era of the Maryland federal system, which abolished the death penalty in 2013.

Higgs’s lawyers argued that it was “arbitrary and unfair” to execute Higgs while Willis Haynes, the man who fired the shots that killed the women, escaped the death penalty.

The federal judge who presided over Higgs’s trial two decades ago said he “deserves little compassion.”

“He received a fair trial and was found guilty and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” wrote US District Judge Peter Messitte in a December 29 ruling.

In a statement after the execution, Higgs’ attorney, Shawn Nolan, said that his client had spent decades on death row helping other inmates and “working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions.”

“The government completed its unprecedented massacre of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a black man who never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King’s birthday,” Nolan said. “There was no reason to kill him, particularly during the pandemic and when he himself fell ill with Covid which he contracted due to these spreading and irresponsible executions.”

Higgs’ December 19 clemency petition alleged that he had been a model prisoner and a devoted father to a son born shortly after his arrest. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10 years old, the petition says.

“Mr. Higgs’s difficult upbringing was not presented in a meaningful way to the jury at trial,” his attorneys wrote.

Higgs was 23 years old on the night of January 26, 1996, when he, Haynes, and a third man, Victor Gloria, picked up the three women in Washington, DC and took them to Higgs’s apartment in Laurel, Maryland, to drink alcohol and listen to music. Before dawn the next morning, an argument between Higgs and Jackson led her to grab a knife in the kitchen before Haynes convinced her to drop it.

Gloria said Jackson made threats as he left the apartment with the other women and appeared to write down the license plate number of Higgs’ truck, infuriating him. The three men chased after the women in the Higgs truck. Haynes persuaded them to get into the vehicle.

Instead of taking them home, Higgs took them to a secluded location in the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, a federal territory in Laurel.

“Aware at the time that something was wrong, one of the women asked if they were going to have to ‘walk from here’ and Higgs replied ‘something like that,'” said an appeals court ruling confirming the death sentence of Higgs.

Higgs handed his pistol to Haynes, who shot the three women outside the truck before the men left, Gloria testified.

“Gloria turned to ask Higgs what he was doing, but she saw Higgs holding the wheel and looking at the gunshots from the rearview mirror,” said the 2013 ruling by a three-judge panel of the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. .

Investigators found Jackson’s agenda at the scene of the murders. It contained Higgs’s nickname, “Bones,” his phone number, his address number, and the tag number for his truck.

Chinn worked with a boys’ choir at a church, Jackson worked in a high school office, and Black was a teacher’s aide at the National Presbyterian School in Washington, according to The Washington Post.

On the day in 2001 that the judge formally sentenced Higgs to death, Black’s mother, Joyce Gaston, said it brought her little comfort, the Post reported.

“It’s never going to be okay in my mind,” Gaston said, “That was my daughter. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it.”