- Late on Friday, the Federal Supreme Court voted in favor of executing the execution of Dustin Higgs, who became the thirteenth person to be killed by the federal government since July.
- Judge Sonia Sotomayor consistently disagreed against the accelerated push for federal executions under the direction of the Department of Justice and wrote a blunt dissent breaking the combined strategy to speed up executions.
- “The Court made these heavy decisions in response to emergency requests, with little opportunity for adequate information and considerations, usually in just a few days or even hours,” said Sotomayor. “Very few of these decisions have offered any public explanation for their justification. This is not justice.”
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The Supreme Court executed Dustin Higgs on Friday night, making Higgs the thirteenth person to be killed by the federal government since July.
Higgs, who had hired COVID-19 in prison, was sentenced to death row in 2001. A petition to prevent Higg’s execution gathered more than 1.5 million signatures before Friday.
In July, the United States Department of Justice ended a 17-year pause in federal executions, under the guidance of Attorney General William Barr. Judge Sonia Sotomayor has always disagreed with the accelerated executions of each individual by the Trump administration.
In his latest dissent, Sotomayor described the recent increase in federal executions and the number of humans behind this. Judges Breyer and Kagan joined Sotomayor in dissent.
“After seventeen years without a single federal execution, the government has executed twelve people since July,” wrote Sotomayor in his dissent.
“They are Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, Dustin Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, William LeCroy Jr., Christopher Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Montgomery and, last night, Corey Johnson,” wrote Sotomayor. “Today, Dustin Higgs will become the thirteenth.”
Sotomayor placed his comments in a historical context, saying that at the federal level, the United States “will have executed more than three times as many people in the past six months as in the previous six decades”.
Read More: A prisoner scheduled to be executed just 5 days before Biden took office tested positive for COVID-19
Describing the Department of Justice’s 2019 protocol, which allowed the federal government to move ahead with executions using a new drug, Sotomayor argued that “throughout this accelerated wave of executions, this Court has consistently rejected the credible claims of prisoners for relief.”
“The Court made these heavy decisions in response to emergency requests, with little opportunity for adequate information and considerations, usually in just a few days or even hours,” said Sotomayor. “Very few of these decisions offered any public explanation for their justification.”
“This is not justice.”
She mentioned efforts by the Trump administration, lower courts and the Supreme Court to speed up federal executions. Sotomayor criticized his colleagues who went ahead with executions, saying that “this Court has repeatedly avoided its usual deliberative processes, often at the request of the Government, allowing it to proceed with an unprecedented and dizzying schedule of executions.”
Sotomayor also condemned the federal government for quickly tracking the executions of two men who tested positive for COVID-19 – Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs – arguing that a faster execution would lift prisoners out of their potential misery. Sotomayor disagreed with Johnson’s federal execution the day before, on January 14, because he was mentally handicapped and was not entitled to judicial review.
Six of the 13 prisoners killed since July were black, and a report from the Death Penalty Information Center in September 2020 showed that black Americans are almost 30 times more likely to face the death penalty for the murder of a white victim than the opposite.
“Those whom the Government executed during this effort deserved more from this Court,” said Sotomayor. “I respectfully disagree.”