TERRE HAUTE, Indiana – The Trump administration carried out its 13th federal execution since Saturday, 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 murdering three women at a wildlife refuge in Maryland in 1996, was the third to receive a lethal injection this week in 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 has overseen so many federal executions.
Higgs, 48, was pronounced dead at 1:23 am. In his final 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 didn’t order the murders.”
“I would like to say that I am an innocent man. I did not order the murders.”
Loud sobs from a woman crying inconsolably echoed for several minutes from a room reserved for the Higgs family as her eyes rolled back, showing the whites of her eyes before he stopped moving completely.
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The number of federal death sentences carried out under Trump since 2020 is greater than in the previous 56 years combined, reducing the number of prisoners on federal death row by almost a quarter. It is likely that none of the remaining 50 men will be executed anytime soon, with Biden signaling that he will end federal executions.
Dustin Higgs is seen at the Federal Prison in Terre Haute, Ind., In 2015. (Federal Bureau of Prisons / Community Federal Defender Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania via AP)
The only woman on death row, Lisa Montgomery, was executed on Wednesday for killing a pregnant woman, removing the baby from her womb and claiming it as her own. She was the first woman executed in almost 70 years.
Federal executions began when the coronavirus pandemic hit prisons across the country. Among the inmates who received COVID-19 last month were Higgs and former drug dealer Corey Johnson, who was executed on Thursday. Some members of the execution teams also tested positive for the virus.
Since the last days of Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the late 1800s, the United States government has not executed federal prisoners during a presidential transition, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Cleveland’s presidency was also the last during which the number of civilian executions was double-digit in a year, 1896, during Cleveland’s second term.
Death Row’s last words
In October 2000, a federal jury in Maryland convicted Higgs for first-degree murder and kidnapping in the deaths of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn. 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. His death sentence was the first imposed in the modern era of the federal system in Maryland, which abolished the death penalty in 2013.
Higgs’ lawyers argued that it was “arbitrary and unfair” to execute Higgs while Willis Haynes, the man who fired the shots that killed the women, was spared the death penalty.
The federal judge who presided over the Higgs trial two decades ago said he “deserves little compassion”.
“He received a fair trial and was sentenced and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a negligible crime,” wrote United States district judge Peter Messitte in a December 29 ruling.
In a statement after the execution, Higgs’ lawyer, Shawn Nolan, said his client spent decades on death row helping other prisoners and “working tirelessly to fight his unfair convictions”.
“The government completed the unprecedented killing of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a black man who never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King’s birthday,” said Nolan. “There was no reason to kill him, especially during the pandemic and when he fell ill with the Covid he hired because of these widespread and irresponsible executions.”
Higgs’ clemency petition on December 19 argued that he had been a model prisoner and father dedicated to a son born shortly after his arrest. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, the petition said.
“Higgs’s difficult education was not significantly presented to the jury at the trial,” wrote his lawyers.
Higgs was 23 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 pick up a knife from the kitchen before Haynes persuaded her to leave it.
Gloria said Jackson made threats when she left the apartment with the other women and seemed to jot down the license plate number for Higgs’s van, annoying him. The three men chased the women in the Higgs van. Haynes convinced them to get into the vehicle.
Instead of taking them home, Higgs took them to a secluded location at the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, federal land in Laurel.
“Aware at the time that something was wrong, one of the women asked if they would have to ‘get out of here’ and Higgs replied ‘something like that’,” said an appeals court upholding Higgs’s death sentence.
Higgs handed his pistol to Haynes, who shot the three women outside the van before the men left, Gloria testified.
“Gloria turned to ask Higgs what he was doing, but saw Higgs holding the steering wheel and watching the shootings in the rearview mirror,” said the 2013 ruling by a panel of three judges at the US Circuit Fourth Court of Appeals.
Investigators found Jackson’s day planner at the scene of the murders. It contained Higgs’s nickname, “Bones,” his phone number, his address number, and his van’s tag number.
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Chinn worked with a church children’s choir, Jackson worked in a high school office, and Black was a teaching aide at the National Presbyterian School in Washington, according to The Washington Post.
On the day in 2001, when the judge formally sentenced Higgs to death, Black’s mother, Joyce Gaston, said it brought little comfort to her, the Post reported.
“It will never be right in my head,” said Gaston, “that was my daughter. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it.”