The last federal prisoner to be executed under the Trump administration was executed early Saturday at the federal penitentiary complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Dustin Higgs, 48, was convicted of the kidnapping and murder of three women at a wildlife refuge in Maryland. Higgs, who was pronounced dead at 1:23 am, was the thirteenth federal convict sentenced to death under Trump’s command.
He was the third to receive a lethal injection this week at the federal prison in Terre Haute.
Higgs was infected with Covid-19, and his lawyers argued that the fatal pentobarbital injection “would cause [him] to a drowning sensation similar to drowning “as a result of virus-related lung damage, according to court documents.
They also noted that their co-defendant, Willis Haynes, was spared the death penalty.
On Thursday night, Corey Johnson, 52, who was convicted of a series of gang crimes that included seven murders, was executed at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute. He also had Covid-19.
His lawyers argued that his lack of mental preparedness, including childhood IQ tests that put him in the mentally disabled category, should have prevented him from being executed.
President-elect Joe Biden, due to open on Wednesday, opposes the federal death penalty and has signaled that it will end its use.
On Friday night, the United States Supreme Court canceled the suspension of the Higgs case, which allowed the execution to continue.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who disagreed, wrote: “After seventeen years without a single federal execution, the government has executed twelve people since July.”
“Today, Dustin Higgs will become the thirteenth,” she continued. “To put this in a historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the past six months as in the previous six decades.”
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.
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.
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 despicable crime,” wrote 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 its 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 contracted due to these irresponsible and widespread 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.
“Sir. 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 decision 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 from the 4th Circuit 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.
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 this. “