Washington, United States
Federal authorities of the United States prepared this Friday their thirteenth and final execution of an unprecedented series, before the transfer of power Donald Trump a Joe Biden, who campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty.
Unless justice pardon you at the last minute, Dustin Higgs, 48-year-old black man, gets lethal injection at federal penitentiary Terre-Haute of Indiana.
One evening in January 1996, he invited three young women to his apartment near Washington with two friends. One of the girls rejected his advances, to which he offered to drive them home, but stopped on isolated federal land instead.
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There he ordered one of his friends to shoot the three women, according to the Justice Department.
In 2000 he was sentenced to death for kidnapping and murder. The author of the shots was sentenced to life imprisonment.
“It is arbitrary and unfair to punish Mr. Higgs more than the killer,” his attorney, Shawn Nolan, said in a leniency application to Trump in late December.
But the Republican president, a staunch defender of the death penalty, disagreed. On the contrary, his government went to court to proceed with the execution before leaving the White House next Wednesday.
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A court had ordered his reprieve on the grounds that Higgs was infected with COVID-19 and that his lungs affected by the disease were likely to be in severe pain at the time of the pentobarbital injection.
The Justice Department immediately appealed and won the case.
A last resort, this time related to competition issues, remains pending with the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has consistently given the green light to federal executions since last summer.
The Republican government resumed this 17-year suspended practice in July, while at the same time the states delayed all executions to prevent the spread of the virus.
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Since then, 12 people have been given lethal injections in Terre-Haute, including, for the first time in nearly 70 years, a woman executed on Tuesday despite doubts about her mental health.
Biden, who will be inaugurated as the new president on Wednesday, opposes the death penalty and has vowed to work with Congress to try to abolish it at the federal level.
Democratic congressmen on Monday introduced a bill to the effect that has a chance of being passed if the party regains control of the Senate.