In October 2000 a federal jury in Maryland convicted Higgs of first-degree murder and kidnapping in the killings of Tamika Black, 19 Mishann Chinn, 23 and Tanji Jackson, 21. “Mr Higgs’s difficult upbringing was not meaningfully presented to the jury at trial,“ his attorneys wrote. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, the petition says. Higgs’s petition for clemency says he has been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born after his arrest. But higher courts overruled those decisions. He didn’t kill anybody.”ĭefense attorneys had won temporary stays of execution for Higgs and another inmate, Corey Johnson, after arguing recent Covid-19 infections put them at greater risk of unnecessary suffering during lethal injections. “And particularly for Dustin, who didn’t shoot anybody. “In the midst of the pandemic and everything that’s going on right now in the country, it seems just insane to move forward with these executions,” Nolan said. A spokesman for Biden has said the Democrat is against the death penalty and will work to end its use. Higgs was executed a few days before Joe Biden becomes president.
Shawn Nolan, one of Higgs’s attorneys, saw a clear political agenda in the unprecedented string of federal executions. Trump ended a 17-year hiatus on the federal death penalty in July.
#Dustin higgs execution trial#
“He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” US District Judge Peter Messitte wrote on 29 December. The federal judge who presided over Higgs’s trial said he “merits little compassion”. His lawyers argued it was “arbitrary and inequitable” to execute him while Willis Haynes, the man who shot the women in 1996, was spared a death sentence. Dustin Higgs, 48, had been sentenced to death for the killings of three women in a Maryland wildlife refuge.
0 kommentar(er)
