“The Court has allowed the US to execute 13 people in 6 months...without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised. Those whom the Government executed during this endeavor deserved more from this Court. I respectfully dissent.” - J. Sotomayor, US v Higgs
"Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent tonight in U.S. v. Dustin Higgs will be remembered long into the future as one of the most thorough, resounding indictments of this administration’s reckless, immoral, illegal effort to execute as many people as possible, as quickly as possible." - Sister Helen Prejean
The 13th and last execution of a federal inmate under Donald Trump’s presidency has taken place in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Dustin Higgs, 48, had been sentenced to death for the killings of three women in a Maryland wildlife refuge. His lawyers argued it was “arbitrary and inequitable” to execute him while Willis Haynes, the man who shot the women in 1996, was spared a death sentence.
The federal judge who presided over Higgs’s trial said he “merits little compassion”.
“He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” US District Judge Peter Messitte wrote on 29 December.
Trump ended a 17-year hiatus on the federal death penalty in July.
Shawn Nolan, one of Higgs’s attorneys, saw a clear political agenda in the unprecedented string of federal executions. Higgs was executed a few days before Joe Biden becomes president. A spokesman for Biden has said the Democrat is against the death penalty and will work to end its use.
“In the midst of the pandemic and everything that’s going on right now in the country, it seems just insane to move forward with these executions,” Nolan said. “And particularly for Dustin, who didn’t shoot anybody. He didn’t kill anybody.”
Defense attorneys had won temporary stays of execution for Higgs and another inmate, Corey Johnson, after arguing recent Covid-19 infections put them at greater risk of unnecessary suffering during lethal injections. But higher courts overruled those decisions. Johnson was killed on Thursday night.
Higgs’s petition for clemency says he has been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born after his arrest. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, the petition says.
“Mr Higgs’s difficult upbringing was not meaningfully presented to the jury at trial,“ his attorneys wrote.
In October 2000 a federal jury in Maryland convicted Higgs of first-degree murder and kidnapping in the killings of Tamika Black, 19; Mishann Chinn, 23; and Tanji Jackson, 21. His death sentence was the first imposed in the modern era of the federal system in Maryland, which abolished the death penalty in 2013.
Higgs was 23 on the evening of 26 January 1996 when he, Haynes and a third man, Victor Gloria, picked up the three women in Washington DC and drove them to Higgs’s apartment in Laurel, Maryland, to drink alcohol and listen to music. Before dawn an argument between Higgs and Jackson prompted her to grab a knife 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 down the number of Higgs’s van. The men chased the women in the van and Haynes persuaded them to get in. Higgs drove them to a secluded spot in 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’,” said an appeals court ruling upholding Higgs’s death sentence.
Higgs handed his pistol to Haynes, who shot all 3 women, 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,” said the 2013 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th US circuit court of appeals.
Chinn worked with the children’s choir at a church, Jackson worked in the office at a high school and Black was a teacher’s aide at National Presbyterian school in Washington, according to the Washington Post.
Investigators found Jackson’s day planner at the scene. It contained Higgs’s nickname, “Bones”, his telephone number, his address and the tag number for his van.
The jurors who convicted Haynes failed to reach a unanimous verdict on a death sentence. A different jury convicted Higgs and returned a death sentence. Gloria pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and was sentenced to seven years.
Higgs argued his death sentence should be thrown out because jurors failed to consider it as a “mitigating factor” that Haynes was convicted of identical charges but sentenced to life. The appeals court concluded that rational jurors could find that Higgs had the dominant role in the murders even though Haynes fired the gun.
In a clemency petition Higgs’s lawyers said Gloria received a “substantial deal” in exchange for his cooperation.
“Moreover,” they wrote, “significant questions remain as to whether Mr Gloria received the additional undisclosed benefit of having an unrelated state murder investigation against him dropped at the urging of federal officers to protect his credibility as the star witness. A federal death verdict should not rest on such a flimsy basis.”
On the day in 2001 when the judge sentenced Higgs to death, Black’s mother, Joyce Gaston, said it brought her little solace, the Post reported. “It’s not going to ever be right in my mind,” Gaston said, “That was my daughter. I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it.”
Higgs becomes the 3rd condemned federal death row inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 16th overall since the government resumed federal executions in 2001.
Higgs becomes the 3rd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,532nd overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977. The next scheduled execution in the USA is set for Thursday evening, Jan. 21, in Texas.
Source: The Guardian, The Associated Press; Rick Halperin, January 16, 2021
Dustin Higgs executed less than a week before Inauguration Day
Higgs maintained his innocence until his death, according to a pool report.
The tone of his voice was calm but defiant as he said his last words, "I'd like to say I am an innocent man," he said, mentioning the three women by name. "I did not order the murders," the report said.
Higgs' victims were Tamika Black, 19; Tanji Jackson, 21; and Mishann Chinn, 23.
Higgs' execution went forward despite his attorney, Shawn Nolan's appeal to delay the proceeding because of Higgs' Covid-19 diagnosis. Nolan also argued that Higgs was unfairly sentenced, since the actual gunman is serving a life sentence.
Higgs' execution was initially scheduled for the 92nd birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
King's oldest son, Martin Luther King III, wrote an op-ed on Thursday in The Washington Post calling for the end to executions by invoking his father's words from 1957 when asked if God approves of the death penalty. "I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime ... capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God," King said.
The Crime
In January 1996, Higgs and two friends drove to Washington, DC, to pick up Black, Jackson, and Chinn, whom Higgs had invited to his apartment in Laurel, Maryland, according to a Department of Justice statement. At the apartment, Jackson rebuffed an advance by Higgs and the women left. Higgs offered the women a ride back to DC, but instead drove to a secluded area in the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, the statement added.
He ordered the women out of the vehicle, gave a gun to one of the friends, and said, "better make sure they're dead." The other man shot Black and Jackson in the chest and back, and shot Chinn in the back of the head, killing all three women, the statement said.
RELATED | Trump's last days in office marred by disregard for human life. Death penalty just another example.
Higgs' convictions and sentences were affirmed on appeal nearly 17 years ago, and his initial round of collateral challenges failed nearly eight years ago, the statement added.
Biden's take on the death penalty
Attorney General William Barr resumed federal executions in July 2020 after a 17-year hiatus to bring "justice to victims of the most horrific crimes." The federal government has authorized the executions of 13 federal death row inmates in about six months. While executions are carried out every year on the state level, federal executions have been extremely rare until last year.
The Biden campaign has spoken out against the federal death penalty, due in part to the amount of wrongfully convicted inmates who have been given these sentences.
While President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to abolish the federal death penalty and to give incentives to states to stop seeking death sentences as a part of his criminal justice plan, 40 members of Congress want to make sure the practice ends on his first day in office.
U.S. Executes Dustin Higgs In 13th And Final Execution Under Trump Administration
The Supreme Court declined to stop the execution, although some justices dissented, noting that before the first of the 13, it had been 17 years since a federal execution had been carried out.
Justice Sonya Sotomayor called it an "unprecedented rush," saying that "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."
Higgs, along with two other men, killed three women in 1996, with one of the men, Willis Haynes, actually pulling the trigger. Haynes pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
Higgs was found guilty in 2000 of multiple federal offenses including first-degree premeditated murder, three counts of first-degree felony murder, and three counts of kidnapping resulting in death.
The crimes were carried out in Maryland which has since dropped the death penalty. Higgs was executed at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., and was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m., according to the Associated Press.
In a statement following the execution, Shawn Nolan, an attorney for Higgs, called him "a fine man, a terrific father, brother, and nephew" who "spent decades on death row in solitary confinement helping others around him, while working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions."
"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," Nolan added.
Higgs had told the court that carrying out the sentence after his COVID-19 infection would be cruel because the resulting lung damage would cause a lethal injection of pentobarbital to give him the sensation of drowning.
Corey Johnson, 52, was executed Thursday night. He had also contracted COVID-19 while in prison, and his attorney argued that executing him following the infection would have been "cruel and unusual punishment."
Lisa Montgomery was executed early Wednesday. She was the only woman on federal death row and the first female prisoner to be put to death by the U.S. government since 1953.
The executions come days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has opposed the federal death penalty. On Monday, Senate Democrats unveiled legislation that would abolish it.
Source: NPR, S. Nuyen, B. Campbell, January 16, 2021
🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.
 |  |
Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde