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TERRE HAUTE, Indiana: The United States government was scheduled to carry out the thirteenth and final federal execution under President Donald Trump on Friday night (January 15), just five days before the president-elect Joe Biden takes office promising to try to end the death penalty.
Five hours after 48-year-old Dustin Higgs was executed, the conservative majority of the US Supreme Court paved the way for the lethal injections to proceed by reversing a suspension ordered by a federal appeals court.
Higgs was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 for overseeing the 1996 kidnapping and murder of three women on a federal wildlife preserve in Maryland: Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn.
The United States Department of Justice plans to execute him with lethal injections of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in the death chamber of his prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday was consistent with its previous decisions: it had also thrown out any lower court orders delaying federal executions since they resumed last year.
The federal government executed 10 people last year, more than three times more than in the previous six decades, marking the first time it has carried out more executions than all US states combined, according to one database. compiled by the Information Center on the Death Penalty. . A minority of the country’s 50 states still carry out executions.
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Higgs is expected to be the 13th person to be executed by the United States government in an extraordinary spree started last summer by Trump, a Republican and outspoken defender of capital punishment, after a 17-year hiatus at the federal level. Before Trump, the federal government had executed just three people since 1963.
After an unsuccessful triple date with the three women, Higgs and his accomplice, Willis Haynes, offered to drive them home, but instead took them to the Patuxent Research Shelter.
Prosecutors said Higgs gave Haynes a gun and told him to shoot the three women. Haynes, who confessed to being the shooter, was sentenced to life in prison, while Higgs was sentenced to death in a separate trial, a disparity that his lawyers say is grounds for clemency.
Prison officials patrol around the United States Penitentiary at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana on January 15, 2021. (Photo: Reuters / Bryan Woolston)
The Supreme Court accepted the Department of Justice’s request to vacate a lower court order delaying the execution while a legal issue is resolved: Federal law requires that an execution be carried out in the manner in which the state in which it is the condemned man was convicted, but Maryland has since abolished the death penalty.
The Justice Department had unsuccessfully sought a new sentencing order from a federal judge in Maryland to allow them to execute Higgs following procedures used in Indiana, a state that still allows lethal injections and is home to the department’s execution chamber.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit scheduled a hearing on the matter for January 27, nearly two weeks after Higgs’s scheduled execution, which the Department of Justice said left her paralyzed unless the court Supreme will revoke the delay.
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 delaying their executions for several weeks to allow their lungs to heal. The Justice Department executed Johnson on Thursday night.
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After the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on behalf of other inmates at the prison complex, a federal judge in Indiana ruled that the executions of Johnson and Higgs could only proceed if the The US Bureau of Prisons applied various measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.
One measure ordered by Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson was for prison and execution officials to observe the “mask requirements,” but media witnesses and Johnson’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. Bill Breeden, who was next door. Johnson said that at least one of the two US officials present in the room did not wear a mask for many minutes.
The ACLU unsuccessfully asked the judge to find the Bureau of Prisons in contempt of court and order that Higgs’s execution be stopped. When asked why he should not be found in contempt, the Bureau of Prisons responded Thursday night saying that the “mask requirements” were not clearly defined and that it was necessary for officers to remove or not use their masks to a “clear communication”.
Higgs’ sister Alexa Cave traveled to Terre Haute with her adult son to witness if the execution proceeds, and said she was praying something would delay it. Life in prison would be a more just punishment, he said, adding that he talks to him on the phone several times a week.
“They have no freedom at all in any sense of the word,” he said in an interview. “What’s the use of killing you? It doesn’t return anything.”
