The federal authorities of the United States they carried out this Saturday their thirteenth and final execution in six months, According to local media, four days before Republican President Donald Trump handed over power to Democrat Joe Biden.
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Dustin Higgs, a 48-year-old African-American, received a lethal injection at the Terre-Haute Federal Penitentiary. in the state of Indiana, reported ‘The New York Times’.
The convict was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. (local time), the New York newspaper reported citing a statement from the Federal Prisons Agency. One night in January 1996, Higgs invited three young women to his apartment near Washington, along with two friends.
After one of them rejected their advances, he offered to take them home, but instead stopped at a federal nature reserve. According to the Justice Department, in this isolated place he ordered one of his friends to shoot the three women. In 2000, he was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murder.
The perpetrator of the shootings was sentenced to life imprisonment. “It’s arbitrary and unfair to punish Mr. Higgs more than the killer,” said his lawyer, Shawn Nolan. in a leniency application addressed 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, did not agree. On the other hand, his administration acted in court to be able to carry out the execution before he left the White House next Wednesday.
A court had ordered the postponement of the execution on Tuesday alleging that Higgs had contracted covid-19 and that his lungs affected by the disease were likely to suffer greatly at the time of pentobarbital injection.
The Justice Department appealed that decision immediately and won the case. The Supreme Court rejected a last appeal related to questions of jurisdiction. The high court now has six Conservative judges among its nine members, three of whom have been appointed by Trump. Since the boreal summer he has systematically given his approval to federal executions.
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An unprecedented series
The Republican administration resumed in July this practice suspended for 17 years, meanwhile states postponed all executions to prevent the spread of viruses.
Since then, 12 people have received lethal injections in Terre-Haute, including, for the first time in nearly 70 years, a woman, who was executed on Tuesday despite doubts about her mental health. “There have never been so many federal executions in such a short amount of time,” notes Richard Dunham, director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
“The highest number of civilians executed by the federal authorities was 16 in 1896,” compared to 13 in the last six months. With the execution of Higgs, 6 convicts suffered the death penalty since Joe Biden’s victory in the November 3 presidential election, an unprecedented fact, Dunham adds.
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There have never been so many federal executions in such a short amount of time
“Historically, presidents who end their term of office focus on pardons and sentence commutations,” remember. Before Trump, no outgoing president “used his discretion to kill people instead of pardoning them.”
According to the expert, the profile of convicts reflects recurring problems in the application of the death penalty in the United States, cwith an overrepresentation of African Americans (seven of the 13).
In addition, two of the executed had serious intellectual deficiencies, two were suffering 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 the new president on Wednesday, he opposes the death penalty and has vowed to work with Congress to try to abolish it at the federal level.
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Democratic lawmakers on Monday introduced a bill to that effect, which is likely to be passed as the party regained control of the Senate.
AFP
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