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But Mr. Higgs was sentenced to dying, a punishment that his attorneys argued was “arbitrary and inequitable” in contrast with that of the person who shot the gun. His protection staff pointed to a declaration that Mr. Haynes signed years after the crime during which he claimed that Mr. Higgs didn’t threaten him nor make him do something. Mr. Haynes claimed he shot the women as a result of he feared for Mr. Higgs’s life.
In an announcement supplied by the Bureau of Prisons, the sister of Ms. Jackson, certainly one of Mr. Higgs’s victims, mentioned that the information of Mr. Higgs’s execution date introduced “mixed emotions.” His household is now going via the identical ache hers skilled, she added.
“On one hand, I felt we were finally going to get justice, but on the other, I felt sad for your family,” she mentioned. “When the day is over, your death will not bring my sister and the other victims back. This is not closure, this is the consequence of your actions.”
Mr. Trump was not receptive to pleas for leniency for Mr. Higgs or for any of the 12 inmates who have been executed earlier than him. The Supreme Court — which now has three Trump appointees, solidifying its conservative majority — additionally denied his requests for reprieve. Shortly earlier than Mr. Higgs’s execution, the justices had vacated a keep from the Fourth Circuit that briefly blocked the federal government.
Each of the court docket’s extra liberal justices indicated that they disagreed. Justice Stephen G. Breyer listed questions that the current federal dying penalty circumstances have raised, amongst them, “To what extent does the government’s use of pentobarbital for executions risk extreme pain and needless suffering?” and, “Has an inmate demonstrated a sufficient likelihood that she is mentally incompetent — to the point where she will not understand the fact, meaning, or significance of her execution?”
“None of these legal questions is frivolous,” he wrote. “What are courts to do when faced with legal questions of this kind? Are they simply to ignore them? Or are they, as in this case, to ‘hurry up, hurry up’? That is no solution.”
But the longer the delay, he argued, the weaker the “basic penological justifications” and the larger the psychological struggling for the prisoner. As he has carried out earlier than, Justice Breyer referred to as into query the constitutionality of the dying penalty itself.
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