Shortly after 1 am on Saturday, Dustin Higgs became the 13th person since July to be executed by the federal government. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court announced a 6-3 ruling paving the way for execution – but not without a sharp dissent from Minister Sonia Sotomayor.
“After seventeen years without a single federal execution, the government has executed twelve people since July,” wrote Sotomayor in his opinion. “Today, Dustin Higgs will become the thirteenth. 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.”
As noted in Sotomayor’s opinion, the Federal Death Penalty Act was enacted in 1994. Before July 2020, only three people had been executed federally – two in 2001 and one person in 2003.
After a 17-year hiatus, President Trump resumed federal executions in July 2020. In December, the US government had executed more people within the year than all states that still carry out executions.
Sotomayor wrote that in the past 7 months there has been an “unprecedented rush” of federal executions that has led to numerous legal disputes.
One such dispute, she wrote, is that the government has scheduled executions at such a rapid pace that those facing executions had to “quickly contest their sentences”. In some cases, she wrote, the courts have not had a chance to even determine whether the executions were legal.
“… the DOJ [Department of Justice] he did not act carefully, “wrote Sotomayor.” … Instead of allowing an orderly resolution of these processes, the government consistently refused to postpone the executions and sought emergency measures to proceed before the courts had significant opportunities to determine whether the executions were legal. ”
Higgs was convicted in 1996 for kidnapping and ordering the murder of three women. His lawyers called for suspension of the execution because they claimed that Higgs’s lungs were damaged after he contracted COVID-19 and argued that the execution would result in “a drowning sensation similar to drowning”.
“This is not justice,” continued Sotomayor. “… However, the Court allowed the United States to execute thirteen people in six months under a legal scheme and regulatory protocol that received inadequate analysis, without resolving the serious claims raised by the convicted individuals. Those that the government executed during this attempt deserved more from this court. “