The Donald Trump administration completes the execution of 13 death sentences

HIGH EARTH, Indiana. The administration of President Donald Trump held this Saturday the thirteenth execution of a prisoner since last July, in an unprecedented race that ended just five days before the swearing-in of President-elect Joe Biden, who opposes the federal death penalty.

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

Higgs, 48, was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. this morning. When asked if he had any final words, Higgs was calm but defiant, naming each of the women the prosecution says he ordered killed.

“I would say I’m an innocent man … I’m not responsible for the deaths,” he said softly. “I didn’t order the deaths.”

There was no apology for anything related to that night, 25 years ago, when the women were shot by another man, who received a life sentence.

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

Loud sobs from a crying woman began to be heard from the witness room reserved for the Higgs family as their eyes closed and their head tilted back. He soon stood still.

A sister of Tanji Jackson – one of the women murdered when she was 21 – addressed a written statement to Higgs after his execution and mentioned her family. “They are now going through the pain we are experiencing,” he expressed. “When the day is over, your death will not bring back my sister or the other victims. This is not a closure.” The statement did not include her sister’s name.

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

None of the remaining 50 men are likely to be executed in the short term, if ever, with Biden noting that he will eliminate federal executions.

The only woman pending capital punishment, Lisa Montgomery, was executed Wednesday for killing a pregnant woman and then stabbing her to remove her unborn baby. She was the first woman executed by the federal government in 70 years.

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

One of those prisoners who became infected last month was Higgs and former drug trafficker Corey Johnson, who was executed Thursday.

During Higgs’ execution this morning, officers inside the execution chamber were more than diligent in keeping their masks on, after a federal judge expressed concern that officers working on Johnson’s execution were be very lax about coronavirus precautions.

Since the last days of Grover Cleveland’s presence in the late 1800s, no U.S. government administration had executed federal inmates in the midst of the presidential transition, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

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

It is already beginning to raise pressure for Biden to live up to his promise to end the federal death penalty.

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

“He must commute the sentences of the people who are on death row by life imprisonment without evidence, and to dismiss the death penalty of all pending trials,” the ACLU stated.

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

Higgs’ lawyers argued 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’ lawyer, Shawn Nolan, said his client had spent decades on death row helping other inmates.

“There was no reason to kill him, particularly during the pandemic and when he had been sick with Covid he contracted because of these irresponsible executions that are super spreaders (of the coronavirus),” he claimed.

Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, Higgs’ petition for clemency said on Dec. 19.

Higgs was 23 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, for drinking and listening to music.

Before dawn, an argument between Higgs and Jackson caused her to grab a kitchen knife before Haynes persuaded her to let it go.

Gloria said Jackson expressed threats as she left the apartment with the other women and appeared to jot down the tablet of Higgs’ bus, causing her to get angry.

The three men chased the women in the Higgs bus. Haynes persuaded them to get in the vehicle. Instead of taking them to their homes, Higgs drove them to a secluded spot at the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge in Laurel.

“Aware that at this point something was wrong, one of the women asked if they should‘ walk from here ’and Higgs replied‘ something like that ’,” according to court documents.

Higgs handed the gun to Haynes, who shot the three women out of the bus, Gloria said. “Gloria turned to Higgs to ask what she was doing, but she saw Higgs holding the steering wheel and watching the shots through the rearview mirror,” the three-judge panel’s ruling said. case in the Court of Appeals Circuit Chamber.

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