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TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — The Trump administration early Saturday carried out its thirteenth federal execution since July, an unprecedented run that concluded simply 5 days earlier than the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden — an opponent of the federal demise penalty.
Dustin Higgs, convicted within the killings of three ladies in a Maryland wildlife refuge in 1996, was the third to obtain a deadly injection this week on the federal jail in Terre Haute, Indiana.
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department resumed federal executions final 12 months following a 17-year hiatus. No president in additional than 120 years had overseen as many federal executions.
Higgs, 48, was pronounced useless at 1:23 a.m. In his closing assertion, Higgs was calm however defiant, mentioning the victims by title.
“I’d like to say I am an innocent man,” he mentioned. “I did not order the murders.”
As the deadly injection of pentobarbital flowed into his veins, he regarded towards members of the family waved along with his fingers and mentioned, “I love you.” Louds sobs of a lady crying inconsolably echoed for a number of minutes from a room reserved for Higgs’ household as his eyes rolled again in his head, displaying the whites of his eyes earlier than he stopped shifting completely.
The variety of federal demise sentences carried out underneath Trump since 2020 is greater than within the earlier 56 years mixed, decreasing the variety of prisoners on federal demise row by practically 1 / 4. It’s possible not one of the round 50 remaining males shall be executed anytime quickly, with Biden signaling he’ll finish federal executions.
The solely girl on demise row, Lisa Montgomery, was executed Wednesday for killing a pregnant girl, then slicing the newborn out of her womb and claiming it as her personal. She was the primary girl executed in practically 70 years.
Federal executions started because the coronavirus pandemic raged by way of prisons nationwide. Among these prisoners who bought COVID-19 final month have been Higgs and former drug trafficker Corey Johnson, who was executed Thursday. Some members of the execution groups have additionally beforehand examined optimistic for the virus.
Not because the waning days of Grover Cleveland’s presidency within the late 1800s has the U.S. authorities executed federal inmates throughout a presidential transition, in accordance with the Death Penalty Information Center. Cleveland’s was additionally the final presidency throughout which the variety of civilians executed federally was within the double digits in a single 12 months, 1896, throughout Cleveland’s second time period.
In October 2000, a federal jury in Maryland convicted Higgs of first-degree homicide and kidnapping within the killings of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn. 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. His demise sentence was the primary imposed within the fashionable period of the federal system in Maryland, which abolished the demise penalty in 2013.
Higgs’ legal professionals argued it was “arbitrary and inequitable” to execute Higgs whereas Willis Haynes, the person who fired the pictures that killed the ladies, was spared a demise sentence.
The federal decide who presided over Higgs’ trial 20 years in the past mentioned he “merits little compassion.”
“He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte wrote in a Dec. 29 ruling.
In an announcement after the execution, Higgs’ legal professional, Shawn Nolan, mentioned his shopper had spent many years on demise row serving to different inmates and “working tirelessly to fight his unjust 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 mentioned. “There was no reason to kill him, particularly during the pandemic and when he, himself, was sick with Covid that he contracted because of these irresponsible, super-spreader executions.”
Higgs’ Dec. 19 petition for clemency argued he had been a mannequin prisoner and devoted father to a son born shortly after his arrest. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and misplaced his mom to most cancers when he was 10, the petition mentioned.
“Mr. Higgs’s difficult upbringing was not meaningfully presented to the jury at trial,” his attorneys wrote.
Higgs was 23 on the night of Jan. 26, 1996, when he, Haynes and a 3rd man, Victor Gloria, picked up the three ladies in Washington, D.C., and drove them to Higgs’ house in Laurel, Maryland, to drink alcohol and hearken to music. Before daybreak the following morning, an argument between Higgs and Jackson prompted her to seize a knife within the kitchen earlier than Haynes persuaded her to drop it.
Gloria mentioned Jackson made threats as she left the house with the opposite ladies and appeared to put in writing down the license plate variety of Higgs’ van, angering him. The three males chased after the ladies in Higgs’ van. Haynes persuaded them to get into the automobile.
Instead of taking them house, Higgs drove them to a secluded spot within the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, federal land in Laurel.
“Aware at that point that something was amiss, one of the women asked if they were going to have to ‘walk from here’ and Higgs responded ‘something like that,’” mentioned an appeals courtroom ruling upholding Higgs’s demise sentence.
Higgs handed his pistol to Haynes, who shot all three ladies outdoors the van earlier than the boys left, 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,” mentioned the 2013 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Investigators discovered Jackson’s day planner on the scene of the killings. It contained Higgs’s nickname, “Bones,” his phone quantity, his tackle quantity and the tag quantity for his van.
Chinn labored with the kids’s choir at a church, Jackson labored within the workplace at a highschool and Black was a trainer’s aide at National Presbyterian School in Washington, in accordance with The Washington Post.
On the day in 2001 when the decide formally sentenced Higgs to demise, Black’s mom, Joyce Gaston, mentioned it introduced her little solace, the Post reported.
“It’s not going to ever be right in my mind,” Gaston mentioned, “That was my daughter. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it.”
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This story has been corrected to execution happening early Saturday.
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Kunzelman reported from College Park, Maryland.
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