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The last federal prisoner to be put to death during the Trump administration was executed early Saturday at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Dustin Higgs, 48, was convicted of the 1996 kidnapping and murder of three women at a Maryland wildlife refuge. Higgs, who was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m., was the thirteenth federal convict to be put to death under Trump.
He was the third to receive a lethal injection this week at Terre Haute federal prison.
Higgs has been infected with Covid-19 and his lawyers have argued that the lethal injection of pentobarbital “would submit [him] to a drowning sensation similar to that of waterboarding “as a result of lung damage linked to the virus, according to court documents.
They also noted that his co-defendant, Willis Haynes, had escaped the death penalty.
On Thursday evening Corey Johnson, a 52-year-old man convicted of a series of gang crimes including seven murders, was executed at the Terre Haute Federal Correctional Complex. He also had Covid-19.
His lawyers have argued that his lack of mental fitness, including childhood IQ tests that put him in the mentally disabled category, should have kept him from being executed.
President-elect Joe Biden, due to be inaugurated on Wednesday, opposes the federal death penalty and has announced it will end its use.
On Friday night, the United States Supreme Court overturned a stay in the Higgs case, allowing the execution to move forward.
Dissenting Judge Sonia Sotomayor 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 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 executed under Trump since 2020 is higher than the previous 56 years combined, reducing the number of federal death row inmates by almost a quarter. It is likely that none of the remaining 50 or so men will be executed anytime soon, with Biden signaling he will end federal executions.
In October 2000, a federal jury in Maryland convicted Higgs of first degree murder and kidnapping in the murders of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn. 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. His death sentence was the first in modern times for Maryland’s federal system, which abolished the death penalty in 2013.
Higgs’ attorneys have argued that it was “arbitrary and unfair” to execute Higgs while Willis Haynes, the man who fired the shots that killed the women, escaped the death penalty.
The federal judge who presided over Higgs’ trial two decades ago said he “deserved little compassion.”
“He received a fair trial and was found guilty and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” wrote US District Judge Peter Messitte in a December 29 decision.
In a post-execution statement, Higgs’ attorney Shawn Nolan said his client had spent decades on death row helping other inmates and “working tirelessly to fight his wrongful convictions” .
“The government completed its unprecedented slaughter of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a black man who never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King’s birthday,” Nolan said. “There was no reason to kill him, especially during the pandemic and when he himself was sick with the Covid he contracted from these irresponsible and super-propagative executions.
Higgs’ December 19 petition for clemency argued that he had been a model prisoner and a devoted father to a son born soon after his arrest. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer at the age of 10, according to the petition.
“Sir. Higgs’ difficult upbringing was not presented in any meaningful way to the jury during the trial,” his lawyers wrote.
Higgs was 23 on the evening of January 26, 1996, when he, Haynes, and a third man, Victor Gloria, picked up the three women in Washington, DC, and drove them to Higgs’ apartment in Laurel, Maryland, to to drink alcohol. and listen to music. Before dawn the next morning, an argument between Higgs and Jackson prompted her to grab a knife in the kitchen before Haynes persuaded her to drop it.
Gloria said Jackson made threats as she left the apartment with the other women and appeared to write the license plate number of Higgs’ van, which made him angry. The three men chased the women in Higgs’ van. Haynes persuaded them to get into the vehicle.
Instead of bringing them home, Higgs led them to a secluded location in the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, federal territory in Laurel.
“Realizing at that point that something was wrong, one of the women asked if they were going to have to ‘get out of here’ and Higgs replied ‘something like that’,” a court ruling said. appeal upholding Higgs’ death sentence.
Higgs handed his pistol to Haynes, who shot the three women outside the van before the men left, Gloria said.
“Gloria turned to ask Higgs what he was doing, but saw Higgs hold the wheel and watch the shots from the rearview mirror,” said the 2013 decision of a three-judge panel of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Investigators found Jackson’s diary at the scene of the murders. It contained Higgs’ nickname, “Bones,” his phone number, address number, and the tag number of his pickup truck.
Chinn worked with the children’s choir in a church, Jackson worked in a high school office, and Black was a teaching assistant at the National Presbyterian School in Washington, according to the Washington Post.
On the day in 2001 that the judge officially sentenced Higgs to death, Black’s mother Joyce Gaston said it brought her a little comfort, the Post reported.
“It will never be right on my mind,” Gaston said, “It was my daughter. I don’t know how I will deal with it.
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