Federal authorities of the United States carried out their thirteenth and final execution in six months this Saturday, according to local media, four days after Republican President Donald Trump ceded power to Democrat Joe Biden.
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Dustin Higgs, a 48-year-old African American, was given a lethal injection at the Terre-Haute Federal Penitentiary, in the state of Indiana, The New York Times reported.
The convict was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. (local time), the New York newspaper said, citing a statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. One night in January 1996 Higgs invited three young women to his apartment near Washington with two friends.
After one of them rejected his advances, he offered to drive them home, but stopped at a federal wildlife refuge instead. According to the Justice Department, he ordered one of his friends to shoot the three women in that remote location. In 2000 he was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murder.
The author of the shots was sentenced to life imprisonment. “It is arbitrary and unfair to punish Mr. Higgs more than the murderer,” said his lawyer, Shawn Nolan. in a petition for clemency to Trump in late December.
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Donald Trump, President of the United States.
EFE / EPA / MICHAEL REYNOLDS
But the Republican president, a staunch defender of the death penalty, disagreed. Other way around, his government went to court to carry out the execution before leaving the White House next Wednesday.
A court ordered the stay of execution on Tuesday because he claimed that Higgs had contracted COVID-19 and that his lungs affected by the disease were likely to be in severe pain at the time of the pentobarbital injection.
The Justice Department immediately appealed that decision and won the case. The Supreme Court rejected a last resort on jurisdictional issues. The Supreme Court now has six Conservative justices among its nine members, three of whom have been appointed by Trump. Since the summer, he has consistently authorized federal executions.
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An unprecedented series
The Republican government resumed this 17-year suspended practice in July states have postponed all executions to prevent the spread of the virus.
Since then, 12 people have been given lethal injections in Terre-Haute, including, for the first time in nearly 70 years, a woman executed on Tuesday despite doubts about her mental health. “There have never been so many federal executions in such a short time,” said Richard Dunham, director of the Washington-based Center for Information on the Death Penalty.
“The highest number of civilians executed by federal authorities was 16 in 1896,” compared to 13 in the past six months. With the execution of Higgs, six convicts have undergone the death penalty since Joe Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 presidential election. an unprecedented fact, Dunham adds.
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There have never been so many federal executions in such a short time
“Historically, outgoing presidents have focused on pardoning and committing sentences”, to remember. Before Trump, no outgoing president “used his discretion to kill people rather than pardon them.”
According to the expert, the profile of the convicts reflects recurring problems in the use of the death penalty in the United States, cThere is an overrepresentation of African Americans (seven out of 13).
In addition, two of the executed had serious intellectual deficiencies, two suffered from mental problems, and two had just reached the age of majority at the time of their crime. Biden, who will be sworn in as new president on Wednesday, opposes the death penalty and has pledged to work with Congress to try to abolish it at the federal level.
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Democratic congressmen introduced a bill to that effect on Monday, with a chance of approval if the party regains control of the Senate.
AFP
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