Indiana, United States
The United States on Saturday executed Dustin Higgs, the last federal death row inmate to receive the lethal injection under President Donald Trump, four days before Joe Biden came to power. abolish this type of sentence.
Higgs was the thirteenth federal-executed prisoner in six months since the Trump administration resumed in July 2020 the executions of criminals who were on the brink of federal death.
Executed in the morning in Terre Haute (Indiana) for the kidnapping and murder of three women in 1996, Higgs he was the third federal death row inmate to receive lethal injection so far in 2021.
In addition, the ten executions completed at the federal level in 2020 made this year the most federal death penalty sentences in 125 years since 1896, according to the Penalty Information Center. Death (DPIC).
No more executions are planned at the federal level until next Wednesday, when Biden will come to power under strong pressure from his party and groups opposed to the death penalty to end the practice, for which a group of Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill this week.
A TEST FOR BIDEN
Biden it has promised to abolish the death penalty for crimes prosecuted at the federal level and give incentives to states to stop seeking death sentences for those crimes that are prosecuted at the state level.
His first evidence in this regard could be related to the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the perpetrators of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, as the Justice Department under Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence against this accused.
If the Justice Department under Biden changes its stance in this case and allows Tsarnaev’s life sentence to continue, it will be an early sign of how the new president’s government plans to address the issue.
The decision by former Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr to resume executions at the federal level after a nearly two-decade hiatus sparked controversy in the United States, where the general trend in recent years had been to resort to increasing less to this sentence and postpone the time to execute those already issued.
Twenty of the country’s 50 states have already abolished the death penalty in their territory, while another 12 have been without execution for more than ten years, according to DPIC.
This led to more executions at the federal level in 2020 than in all states together, something unprecedented in country history.
THE CASE OF HIGGS
Lawyers for Higgs, the last executed Trump presidency, tried to postpone the execution of his sentence because the prisoner had contracted covid-19, but the Supreme Court eventually allowed him to go ahead.
Higgs defended to the end his innocence in the crimes of those who accused him, for the kidnapping and murder of three women, while his lawyers complained that the man who fired the lethal shots in this event, Willis Haynes, went evade the death penalty and was instead sentenced to life imprisonment.
“I mean I’m an innocent man. I didn’t order the murders,” Higgs said just before receiving the lethal injection, according to CNN.
Her execution came three days after that of Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be executed at the federal level in more than six decades, which led the European Union (EU) to stress that the death penalty is “incompatible with human dignity and the right to life “. EFE