Donald Trump’s administration completes execution of 13 death sentences

HIGH EARTH, Indiana.- President Donald Trump’s administration carried out the 13th execution of a prisoner since last July on Saturday, in an unprecedented race that ended just five days before President-elect Joe Biden was sworn in, who opposes the death penalty. federal.

The Justice Department of the Donald Trymp administration was resumed federal executions last year, after 17 years on hiatus. In more than 120 years, no president has seen so many federal executions.

Higgs, 48, was pronounced dead today at 1:23 am. When asked if he had any last words, Higgs was calm but defiant and named each of the women the prosecution said were murdered.

“I’d like to say I’m an innocent man … I’m not responsible for the dead,” he said softly. “I did not order death.”

He made no apologies for anything related to that night 25 years ago when the women were shot by another man who was given a life sentence.

As the lethal injection began to flow through his veins, Higgs looked around the room reserved for his family and lawyers. He waved his fingers and said, “I love you.”

Loud sobs from a crying woman were heard from the witness room reserved for the Higgs family as her eyes closed and her head tilted back. Soon he was silent.

A sister of Tanji Jackson – one of the women who was murdered when she was 21 – made a written statement to Higgs after her execution, naming her family. “Now they are going through the pain we’ve been through,” he said. “When the day is over, your death won’t bring back my sister or the other victims. This is not a closure ”. The statement did not include his sister’s name.

The total of federal death sentences carried out under Trump since 2020 is higher than in the previous 56 years combined, dropping the number of federal death row inmates by nearly a quarter.

None of the remaining 50 men are likely to be executed anytime soon, with Biden indicating he will eliminate federal executions.

The only woman to face the death penalty, Lisa Montgomery, was executed on Wednesday for murdering a pregnant woman and then stabbing her to remove the baby from the womb. She was the first woman to be executed by the federal government in 70 years.

Federal executions resumed as the COVID-19 coronavirus spread through prisons across the country.

One of those inmates who became infected last month was Higgs and former drug lord Corey Johnson, who was executed on Thursday.

During Higgs’s execution this morning, the officers in the execution room were more than diligent in keeping their masks, after a federal judge raised concerns that the officers working on Johnson’s execution were too lax about coronavirus precautions .

According to the Center for Information on the Death Penalty, since the last days of Grover Cleveland’s presence in the late 1800s, no United States government had executed federal prisoners during the presidential transition.

The Cleveland presidency was also the last in which the total of civilians executed by the federal government in one year, 1896, reached double digits.

The pressure on Biden is already mounting to fulfill his promise to end the federal death penalty.

The Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a statement after Higgs’s execution urging Biden to invoke his presidential powers after he was sworn in.

“He must convert the sentences of people on death row without probation to life, and he must remove the death penalty from all pending trials,” the ACLU said.

In 2000, a federal jury in Maryland found Higgs guilty of the murder and kidnapping of 19-year-old Tamika Black; Mishann Chinn, 23 years old; and Tanji Jackson.

Higgs’s lawyers argued that it was “arbitrary and unfair” to execute Higgs while Willis Haynes, the man who fired the shots that killed the women, escaped the death penalty.

In a statement after the execution, Higgs’ attorney, Shawn Nolan, said his client had spent decades on death row to help other inmates.

“There was no reason to kill him, especially during the pandemic and when he was sick with Covid, which he contracted because of these irresponsible executions that spread super (of the coronavirus,” he said.

Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10 years old, Higgs’ plea for leniency indicated on December 19.

Higgs was 23 years old on the night of January 26, 1996, when he, Haynes, and a third man, Victor Gloria, picked up the three women in Washington DC and took them to Higgs’ apartment in Laurel, Maryland, to drink. alcohol and listening to music.

Before dawn, an argument between Higgs and Jackson prompted her to grab a knife from the kitchen before Haynes persuaded her to drop it.

Gloria said Jackson had made threats when she left the apartment with the other women and seemed to jot the tablet in Higgs’ bus, infuriating her.

The three men chased the women in the Higgs bus. Haynes persuaded them to get into the car. Rather than take them home, Higgs led them to a remote location in the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge in Laurel.

“Aware that something was wrong at the time, one of the women asked if they should ‘walk from there’ and Higgs replied ‘something like that,’” court documents said.

Higgs handed the gun to Haynes, who shot the three women outside the bus, Gloria said. “Gloria turned to Higgs to ask what he was doing, but she saw Higgs holding the wheel and watching the shots through the rearview mirror,” said the panel of three judges hearing the case in the Fourth Circuit. Court of Appeals. .

Chinn worked with a boys’ choir at a church, Jackson worked in a high school, and Black was a teacher’s assistant at Washington’s National Presbyterian School, according to the Washington Post.