Shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday, Dustin Higgs became the 13th person since July to be executed by the federal government. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court announced a 6-3 decision that paved the way for execution, but it was not without a scathing dissent from Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
“After seventeen years without a single federal execution, the government has executed twelve people since July,” Sotomayor wrote in his opinion. “Today, Dustin Higgs will become the thirteenth. To put it in a historical context, the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months as in the previous six decades.”
As noted in Sotomayor’s opinion, the Federal Death Penalty Act was enacted in 1994. By July 2020, only three people had been executed federally, two in 2001 and one person in 2003.
After a 17-year hiatus, President Trump resumed federal executions in July 2020. In December, the U.S. government had executed more people within the year that all states that still carry out executions.
Sotomayor wrote that in the past seven months there has been an “unprecedented rush” of federal executions that has sparked numerous legal disputes.
One such dispute, he wrote, is that the government scheduled executions at such a rapid pace that those facing executions had to “speed up the challenges of their sentences.” In some cases, he wrote, the courts could not even determine whether the executions were legal.
“… the DOJ [Department of Justice] he did not tread carefully, “Sotomayor wrote.” … Instead of allowing an orderly resolution of these lawsuits, the Government consistently refused to postpone executions and called for urgent measures so that the courts would have significant opportunities to determine whether the executions were even legal. . ”
Higgs he was convicted in 1996 of kidnapping and ordering the murder of three women. His lawyers had called for the suspension of the execution because they claimed Higgs’ lungs were damaged after contracting COVID-19 and argued that the execution would result in “a waterboarding-like drowning sensation.”
“This is not justice,” Sotomayor continued. “… However, the Court has allowed the United States to execute thirteen people in six months under a legal scheme and a regulatory protocol that have received inadequate control, without resolving the serious claims raised by the convicts. Government executed during this effort deserved more this court. “