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A thirteenth death row prisoner has been executed beneath Donald Trump – the final in an nearly unprecedented spree of federal killings permitted by an American president.
Dustin Higgs, who ordered the homicide of three girls in a wildlife refuge in 1996, was given a deadly injection at an Indiana jail on Saturday morning.
The 48-year-old’s demise provides to Mr Trump’s macabre tally: no president because the nineteenth century has overseen so many executions.
So many capital punishments have been waved by way of – all since July – that Mr Trump has diminished the numbers on federal demise row by nearly 1 / 4.
Especially galling to opponents of the demise penalty has been that six of the 13 have been carried out since Mr Trump misplaced November’s election to Joe Biden, a fierce critic of the system.
Higgs, himself, was pronounced useless at 1:23am.
In his last assertion, he repeated his declare that he was harmless. “I did not order the murders,” he stated.
It adopted 21 years after he was convicted of kidnapping and killing three girls Tamika Black, 19, Mishann Chinn, 23, and Tanji Jackson, 21, on the evening of 26 January 1996.
The trio – who all labored with youngsters – had spent the night at Higgs’ condo in Laurel, Maryland, after assembly him and two different males, Willis Haynes and Victor Gloria, on an evening out.
At some level, the court docket heard, an argument had damaged out and the ladies had left however the three males had adopted them, persuaded them to get into Higgs’s van after which drove them out to secluded spot within the close by Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge.
“Aware at that time that one thing was amiss, one of many girls requested in the event that they have been going to need to ‘stroll from right here’ and Higgs responded ‘one thing like that’,” stated a later appeals court docket ruling which upheld Higgs’s demise sentence.
After parking up, Higgs handed a pistol to Haynes, who shot all three girls outdoors the van, Gloria testified.
“Gloria turned to ask Higgs what he was doing, but saw Higgs holding the steering wheel and watching the shootings from the rearview mirror,” stated the 2013 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The father-of-one all the time denied he had ordered the killing, and his attorneys argued it was “arbitrary and inequitable” to execute him whereas Haynes was spared the demise sentence.
In a press release after the execution, his legal professional, Shawn Nolan, stated: “The authorities accomplished its unprecedented slaughter of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a black man who by no means killed anybody, on Martin Luther King’s birthday.
“There was no motive to kill him, significantly in the course of the pandemic and when he, himself, was sick with Covid that he contracted due to these irresponsible, super-spreader executions.”
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