Lethal injection of Dustin Higgs, the last federal execution under the Trump Administration was carried out this Saturday in Indiana | The State
The US government reactivated executions at the federal level in July after a 17-year hiatus.
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Dustin Higgs, a prisoner on death row in Indiana, died this Saturday in the last federal execution carried out under the government of the outgoing president Donald trump.
Higgs was sentenced to capital punishment for ordering the murder of three women in the Washington, DC area in 1996. Until the last moment before his death, the African American insisted on his innocence.
“I would like to say that I am an innocent man,” he said, mentioning the three victims by name. “I did not order the killings,” he added.
Higgs passed away at 01:23 local time (06:23 GMT) after receiving the lethal injection.
Federal execution number 13 since July
This is the 13th execution since July, when the US government reactivated this procedure at the federal level after a 17-year hiatus, the BBC network report says.
The Trump Administration has faced numerous criticisms for the speed with which it has carried out these procedures, regardless of the impending transition of power.
The facts
Higgs was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 for overseeing the 1996 abduction and murder of Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn.
The women were on a date with Higgs and two other men in an apartment, when one rejected their advances and started an argument.
Higgs and his accomplice Willis Haynes offered to drive them to the house. However, the men moved them to a wildlife refuge in Maryland, where Higgs gave Haynes a gun and told him to shoot at three.
Haynes, who confessed to being the shooter, was sentenced to life in prison in a separate trial.
Request for clemency to Trump
In the clemency petition sent to Trump, the lawyers of the already executed argued: “It is arbitrary and unfair to punish Higgs more severely than the real murderer.”
Higgs was the third to die in Terre Haute Federal Prison this week. Last Wednesday she was executed Lisa montgomery, the only woman on federal death row.
On Thursday, he was executed Corey Johnson, another African American convicted of killing seven people in 1992, in Virginia, in connection with drug trafficking.
“The government completed its unprecedented massacre 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 the attorneys for the President, said in a statement. convicted.
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