“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.” “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.
In a statement after the execution, Nolan said his client had spent decades on death row helping other inmates and “working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions.”
DUSTIN HIGGS INNOCENT TRIAL
“There is no principled basis to execute Dustin Higgs given that the shooter in this case is serving a life sentence and the trial prosecutors actively misled the jury in Dustin’s case,” Shawn Nolan, chief of the Capital Habeas Unit at the Federal Community Defenders for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, one of Higgs’ attorneys, said in advance of Friday's decision. Higgs’ lawyers asked for a 90-day stay of execution for hearings, and that his death sentence be commuted. "Dustin spent decades on death row in solitary confinement helping others around him, while working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions.The lawyers pointed to Higgs' Poughkeepsie upbringing in their petition, stating the Maryland federal court jury that sentenced him to death never learned Higgs had spent his early years in a poor, violence-plagued neighborhood that he watched his rarely-present biological father deal drugs and abuse his alcohol-dependent mother, who died of cancer when he was still a child or that extensive school records showed Higgs had significant intellectual and social impairment. "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," Shawn Nolan, one of Higgs's lawyers, said in a statement. Higgs was the third to die at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana this week including Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row on Wednesday. "I'd like to say I am an innocent man," he said, mentioning the three women by name. In his final words, Higgs repeated his claim to innocence. She also listed the names of all 13 executed since July: "To put that in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months that it had in the previous six decades." "After waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully. "This is not justice," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. Johnson was put to death on Thursday.Ī final bid to halt Higgs's execution then failed on Friday when the US Supreme Court's conservative majority voted 6-3 to clear the way the sentence to be carried out. "It is arbitrary and inequitable to punish Mr Higgs more severely than the actual killer," a lawyer had appealed in a plea for clemency addressed to President Trump.Ī court had ordered a stay of execution for Higgs and another inmate, Corey Johnson, on Tuesday after they contracted Covid-19 on death row - with lawyers arguing damage to their lung tissue would cause painful suffering during their executions.īut the Department of Justice immediately appealed and won the case. Haynes, who confessed to being the shooter, was sentenced to life in prison in a separate trial. Higgs and accomplice Willis Haynes offered to drive them home but instead took them to a wildlife refuge in Maryland, where prosecutors said Higgs gave Haynes a gun and told him to shoot the three women. The women had been on a date with Higgs and two other men at an apartment before one rebuffed his advances and an argument broke out between the group.
Higgs was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 for overseeing the 1996 kidnapping and murder of three women: Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn. There has been criticism of the Trump administration's rush to carry out the sentences - breaking with an 130-year-old precedent of pausing executions during a presidential transition. It comes just days before President-elect Joe Biden, who is against the death penalty, is sworn in. His execution is the 13th carried out since July when the US government ended a 17-year hiatus on federal executions. He died by lethal injection at 01:23 local time (06:23 GMT) on Saturday. Higgs was convicted in the killings of three women in a wildlife refuge in 1996, but until his death denied ordering their murder. Dustin Higgs: Final execution of Trump presidency is carried outĭustin Higgs, an inmate on death row in Indiana, has died in the final federal execution of the Trump presidency just days before he leaves office.
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