Supreme Court judges Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer criticized the Trump administration for serving its 13th and final day of federal execution before the president stepped down.
Dustin John Higgs died by lethal injection at the federal correctional facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Friday night, after his 11-hour clemency appeal was rejected.
Higgs, 48, was convicted of the murder of three women at a wildlife refuge in Maryland in 1996, although he was an accomplice who fired the fatal shots. Willis Haynes was convicted of the same crime, but sentenced to life in prison.
“That was not justice,” wrote Sotomayor, nominated by Barack Obama, in an order issued Friday night.
Sotomayor, who criticized the Trump administration’s July 2019 announcement that it would resume federal executions after a two-decade hiatus, condemned what it considered an “unprecedented race” to kill convicted prisoners. All 13 executions have taken place since July 2020.
“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,” she wrote.
“There can be no ‘instant justice’ in matters of life and death,” added Sotomayor. “Still, the court allowed the United States to execute 13 people in six months under a legal scheme and regulatory protocol that received inadequate analysis, without resolving the serious claims raised by the convicts.”
Breyer, a liberal colleague in the upper court of nine judges, was equally scathing, naming each of the 13 executed prisoners and observing a lower court’s observation that Higgs had significant lung damage. The lethal injection of pentobarbital, said Breyer, “would subject you to a drowning sensation similar to drowning.”
He said the court needed to assess whether the enforcement protocols would risk extreme pain and unnecessary suffering and put pressure on the courts to make last-minute decisions about life and death.
“What should the courts do when faced with such legal issues?” He wrote. “Should they ‘hurry up, hurry up?'”
Breyer went beyond Sotomayor by questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty, the first member of the current panel to do so. The third liberal justice, Elena Kagan, also disagreed in the Higgs case, but gave no explanation.
Higgs’s request for clemency said he had been a model prisoner and a dedicated father to a son born after his arrest. He had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, he said.
He was convicted in October 2000 by a federal jury in Maryland for first-degree murder and kidnapping in the deaths of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn, 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. Although Haynes shot the women, Higgs handed him his gun.
“He received a fair trial and was sentenced and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” wrote American district judge Peter Messitte in December.
Probably the most prominent execution of the Trump administration occurred a few days ago, when Lisa Montgomery received a lethal injection in Terre Haute and became the first woman sentenced to death by the federal government almost seven decades ago.
His lawyer accused the Trump administration of “unnecessary and vicious use of authoritarian power”.
Many believe the authorities rushed to complete a series of executions before Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20. Biden declared his desire to abolish the death penalty at the federal and state levels.