US carries out thirteenth and ultimate execution underneath Trump administration

The US authorities early on Saturday carried out the thirteenth and ultimate federal execution underneath President Donald Trump’s administration, simply days earlier than President-elect Joe Biden takes workplace with a promise to attempt to finish the demise penalty.
Dustin Higgs, 48, was pronounced lifeless at 1:23 a.m. EST (0623 GMT), the federal Bureau of Prisons stated in an announcement.
Five hours after he was set to be executed, the US Supreme Court’s conservative majority cleared the best way for deadly injections to proceed, overturning a keep ordered by a federal appeals courtroom.
Higgs was convicted and sentenced to demise in 2001 for overseeing the kidnapping and homicide of three girls on a federal wildlife reserve in Maryland in 1996: Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn.
In his ultimate phrases, Higgs sounded calm and defiant, based on a reporter who served as a media witness.
“I’d like to say I am an innocent man,” he stated, mentioning the three girls by identify. “I did not order the murders.”
The Department of Justice executed him with deadly injections of pentobarbital, a strong barbiturate, at its demise chamber in its jail in Terre Haute, Indiana.
“The government completed its unprecedented slaughter of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a Black man who never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King’s birthday,” Shawn Nolan, one among Higgs’ legal professionals, stated in an announcement.”
Dustin spent many years on demise row in solitary confinement serving to others round him, whereas working tirelessly to combat his unjust convictions.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling was per its earlier choices: it had dismissed all orders by decrease courts delaying federal executions since they have been resumed final yr.
“This is not justice,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “After waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully. When it did not, this Court should have. It has not.”
The federal authorities executed 10 folks final yr, greater than thrice as many as within the earlier six many years, marking the primary time that it had performed extra executions than all US states mixed, based on a database compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center. A minority of the nation’s 50 states nonetheless perform executions.
Higgs was the thirteenth particular person executed by the US authorities in a rare spree begun final summer season by Trump, a Republican, after a 17-year hiatus on the federal degree. Only three folks since 1963 had been executed by the federal authorities earlier than Trump.

After a failed triple date with the three girls, Higgs and confederate Willis Haynes supplied to drive them dwelling however as an alternative took them to the Patuxent Research Refuge. Prosecutors stated Higgs gave Haynes a gun and instructed him to shoot the three girls.
Haynes, who confessed to being the shooter, was sentenced to life in jail whereas Higgs was sentenced to demise in a separate trial, a disparity that his legal professionals say was grounds for clemency.

Higgs and one other demise row inmate, Corey Johnson, have been identified with COVID-19 in December, however on Wednesday the Supreme Court rejected an order by a federal choose in Washington delaying their executions for a number of weeks to permit their lungs to heal. The Justice Department executed Johnson on Thursday night time.