
Higgs's difficult upbringing was not meaningfully presented to the jury at trial. He had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, the petition said. Dustin John Higgs, 48, was pronounced dead at 1. Higgs' 19 December petition for clemency argued he had been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born shortly after his arrest. "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." Mr Nolan said: "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, Higgs' attorney, said in a statement after the execution that his client had spent decades on death row helping other inmates and "working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions". Circuit Court of Appeals.Subscribe to the Daily podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker “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 U.S. Higgs handed his pistol to Haynes, who shot all three women outside the van before the men left, Gloria testified. “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. Instead of taking them home, Higgs drove them to a secluded spot in the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, federal land in Laurel. Haynes persuaded them to get into the vehicle.Ĭapital punishment: US executes Virginia gang killer despite COVID-19 infection, the 12th inmate put to death during Trump administration The three men chased after the women in Higgs’ van.
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Gloria said Jackson made threats as she left the apartment with the other women and appeared to write down the license plate number of Higgs’ van, angering him. Before dawn the next morning, an argument between Higgs and Jackson prompted her to grab a knife in the kitchen before Haynes persuaded her to drop it. 26, 1996, when he, Haynes and a third man, Victor Gloria, picked up the three women in Washington, D.C., and drove them to Higgs’ apartment in Laurel, Maryland, to drink alcohol and listen to music. Higgs’s difficult upbringing was not meaningfully presented to the jury at trial,” his attorneys wrote. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, the petition said. The jury subsequently determined that Higgs. 19 petition for clemency argued he had been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born shortly after his arrest. PJM 98-520 MEMORANDUM OPINION More than two decades ago, a jury sitting in the District of Maryland found Defendant Dustin Higgs guilty on 15 counts for the first-degree murder and kidnapping of Tamika Black, Mishann Chinn, and Tanji Jackson. “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.” “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,” Nolan said. In a statement after the execution, Higgs’ attorney, Shawn Nolan, said his client had spent decades on death row helping other inmates and “working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions.” In his final statement, he repeated his claim that he was innocent. Cleveland’s was also the last presidency during which the number of civilians executed federally was in the double digits in one year, 1896, during Cleveland’s second term. Higgs, himself, was pronounced dead at 1:23am.

government executed federal inmates during a presidential transition, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Not since the waning days of Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the late 1800s has the U.S. Some members of the execution teams have also previously tested positive for the virus. Among those prisoners who got COVID-19 last month were Higgs and former drug trafficker Corey Johnson, who was executed Thursday. She was the first woman executed in nearly 70 years.įederal executions began as the coronavirus pandemic raged through prisons nationwide. The only woman on death row, Lisa Montgomery, was executed Wednesday for killing a pregnant woman, then cutting the baby out of her womb and claiming it as her own. It’s likely none of the around 50 remaining men will be executed anytime soon, with Biden signaling he’ll end federal executions. The number of federal death sentences carried out under Trump since 2020 is more than in the previous 56 years combined, reducing the number of prisoners on federal death row by nearly a quarter.
