Higgs became the 13th person executed by the US government in the string of executions begun last summer by Trump, after a 17-year hiatus at the federal level. That theory was reportedly supported exclusively by the contested testimony of Victor Gloria, a cooperating co-defendant and Higgs other friend on the night of the killing. The Justice Department executed Johnson on Thursday night. Higgs attorneys have also argued that their client was prosecuted on the unreliable theory that he ordered Haynes to kill the victims. Higgs and another death row inmate, Corey Johnson, had been diagnosed with Covid-19 in December.īut on Wednesday the Supreme Court rejected an order by a federal judge in Washington delaying their executions for several weeks to allow their lungs to heal. “When it did not, this Court should have. “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 dissent. The Supreme Court’s ruling was consistent with its earlier decisions: it had dismissed all orders by lower courts delaying federal executions since they were resumed last year. “Dustin spent decades on death row in solitary confinement helping others around him, while 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,” Shawn Nolan, one of Higgs’ lawyers, said in a statement following the execution. The Department of Justice executed him with lethal injections of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, at its death chamber in its prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. EST (6.23am GMT), the Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement. However the US Supreme Court’s conservative majority cleared the way for lethal injections to proceed, overturning the stay ordered by a federal appeals court.
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