Shortly after 1am on 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 the execution – but it wasn’t without a scathing opinion from Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
“After 17 years without a single federal execution, the government has executed 12 people since July,” Sotomayor wrote in her opinion. “Today, Dustin Higgs will be the 13th. To put that in historical context, the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the past six months than in the past six decades.”
As noted in Sotomayor’s opinion, the Federal Death Penalty Act went into effect in 1994. Before July 2020, only three people had been federally executed – two in 2001 and one person in 2003.
After a 17-year hiatus, President Trump resumed federal executions in July 2020. In December, the US government had more people within the year than all states that still carry out executions.
Sotomayor wrote that the past 7 months saw an “unprecedented rush” of federal executions that has led to numerous legal disputes.
One such dispute, she wrote, is that the government planned the executions so quickly that those facing the executions had to “speed up their sentences.” In some cases, she wrote, the courts didn’t even have a chance to determine whether the executions were legal.
“… the DOJ [Department of Justice] did not proceed with caution, “wrote Sotomayor.” … Rather than allowing an orderly resolution of these lawsuits, the government consistently refused to delay the executions and sought emergency aid before the courts had any meaningful avenues to determine whether the executions were even legal. ”
Higgs was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three women in 1996. His lawyers had asked for a stay of execution because they claimed that Higgs’s lungs were damaged after contracting COVID-19, and argued that the execution would result in “a feeling of drowning, akin to waterboarding.”
“This is not justice,” Sotomayor continued. “… Yet the Court has allowed the United States to execute 13 people in six months under a legal system and regulatory protocol that have been insufficiently investigated, without resolving the serious claims brought forward by the convicted individuals. executed the government in this endeavor. deserved more from this court. “