With less than one week before Inauguration Day Trump has given his stamp of approval to execute another inmate. The self proclaimed “pro life” outgoing President seems to be holding a basket of cherries as the 13th captive has lost their life during his tenure. On Saturday Dustin John Higgs 48 was killed shortly before dawn after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay on his execution the day prior. Higgs was murdered at a Terre Haute prison for allegedly orchestrating a hit on three women in 1996. The individual who committed the slayings was not sentenced to die.
Higgs was Covid-19 positive according to the Bureau of Prisons who informed his Attorney Shawn Nolan on Thursday. Nolan fervently defended the deceased and slammed his execution.
“The government completed it’s unprecedented slaughter of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a Black man who’s never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King’s Birthday. Nolan went on to say “There was no reason to kill him, particularly during the pandemic and when he, himself, was sick with Covid that he contracted because of these irresponsible super spreader executions.”
Nolan questioned Higgs representation throughout his trial. He also revealed how the defendant loss his mother to cancer at the age of 10 saying “Mr. Higgs difficult upbringing was not meaningfully presented to the jury at trial.” He also said “It is arbitrary and inequitable to punish Mr. Higgs more severely than the actual killer.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor shared her disdain with the courts decision stating “This is not justice, after waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully. When it did not, this Court should have. It has not.” Sotomayor also listed the names of the fallen under Trumps administration and continued “To put that in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months that it had in the previous six decades.”
The execution was initially scheduled on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. His son wrote a article in The Washington Post on Thursday invoking his fathers words, excerpts read “I do not think that God approves of the death penalty for any crime…capital punishment is against the better judgement of modern criminology and above all against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.” The civil rights icon’s daughter Bernice King also tried to assist in halting Higgs execution.
Dustin John Higgs is the final man to be executed under Trump’s hypocritical administration. He maintained the assertion of his innocence until the day of his death.
BY:BEWITTY Staff
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