Dustin Higgs, a prisoner on death row in Indiana, died this Saturday in the last federal execution carried out during the government of Donald Trump, a few days after the end of his presidency.
Higgs was convicted of ordering the murder of three women young men in the Washington DC area in 1996 , but until the moment of his death he denied his role in the homicides.
Higgs passed away at 01: 23 local time (13: 26 GMT) after receiving the lethal injection.
This is execution number 13 carried out since July, when the US government ended a interval of 17 years without federal executions.
The Trump administration has faced a wave of criticism for its rush to comply with these sentences, an action that breaks a precedent of 130 Years of stopping executions during a presidential transition.
Why was Dustin Higgs convicted?
Higgs was found guilty and sentenced to death in 2001 for overseeing the kidnapping and murder at 1996 of three women: Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn.
REUTERS
Alexa Cave, sister of Dustin Higgs, was present at the execution.
The women were on a date with Higgs and two other men in an apartment, when one rejected their advances and an argument broke out among the group.
Higgs and his accomplice Willis Haynes offered to drive them home, but instead took them to a wildlife refuge in Maryland, where Higgs gave Haynes a gun and told him to shoot at three, according to prosecutors.
Haynes, who confessed to being the shooter, was sentenced to life imprisonment in a separate trial.
“It is arbitrary and unfair to punish Higgs more severely than the real murderer,” said a lawyer during a clemency appeal directed to the President Trump.
A court had ordered the stay of the execution of Higgs and another inmate, Corey Johnson, Tuesday, after they both contracted covid – 19 on death row, and lawyers argue that damage to e The lung tissue would cause them painful suffering during the execution.
But the Justice Department immediately appealed and won the case. Johnson was executed on Thursday.
A final attempt to stop Higgs’s execution failed on Friday, when the conservative majority of the US Supreme Court voted 6- 3 for the sentence to be executed.
“This It is not justice ”
“ This is not justice ” wrote Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
“After waiting nearly two decades to resume federal executions, the government should have proceeded with some restraint to make sure it was done legally. ”
“ When it didn’t , this court should have. He didn’t. ”
Sotomayor also listed the names of the 13 executed since July.
“To put this in historical context, the federal government will have executed three times more people in the last six months than in the previous six decades. ”
In his last words, Higgs insisted on his innocence.
“I would like to say that I am an innocent man,” he said, mentioning the three women by name. “I didn’t order the killings.”
Higgs was the third to die in federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, this week. Last Wednesday, Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, was also executed.
“Tonight the government completed its unprecedented massacre of 13 human beings by killing Dustin Higgs, a black man who never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King’s birthday ” Shawn Nolan, one of Higgs’s attorneys, said in a statement.
“Dustin spent decades at the death row in solitary confinement helping others around him, while working tirelessly to fight his unjust sentences. ”
