The American federal authorities proceeded Saturday, January 16 to their 13th and last execution in six months, according to media, an unprecedented series which, again, will distinguish Donald Trump from his predecessors in the history books.
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He will spend the rest of his life in court ”
Dustin Higgs, a 48-year-old black man, received a lethal injection at Terre-Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana, The
New York Times reported
.
He was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m., the newspaper said, citing a statement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
One evening in January 1996, he had invited three young women to his apartment near Washington, with two friends.
One of them having refused his advances, he had offered to renew them, but had stopped in an isolated federal reserve.
According to the Ministry of Justice, he then ordered one of his friends to shoot the three women.
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 Dustin Higgs more than the killer,
" said his lawyer Shawn Nolan in a request for clemency addressed to Donald Trump.
As in other cases, the Republican president, a fervent defender of the death penalty, had not followed up.
On the contrary, his administration fought in court to be able to proceed with the execution before he left the White House in four days.
Historical
A court had indeed granted, on Tuesday, a reprieve to Dustin Higgs because he had contracted the Covid-19 and was likely to suffer more at the time of the injection of pentobarbital.
The Department of Justice immediately appealed and won the case.
A last recourse, which related to questions of jurisdiction, had been studied by the Supreme Court, which rejected it: the high court, profoundly changed by Donald Trump now has six conservative judges out of nine and they have systematically given the green light to federal executions since the summer.
The Republican administration resumed in July with a practice suspended for 17 years.
Twelve Americans have since received lethal injections, including, for the first time in nearly 70 years, a woman who was executed despite doubts about her mental health.
“
There have never been so many federal executions in such a short period of time
,” notes Richard Dunham, director of the Information Center on the Death Penalty: “
The maximum number of civilians executed by the federal authorities was 16 in 1896
”, compared with 13 executions in six months.
With the execution of Dustin Higgs, six have taken place since Joe Biden's presidential victory on November 3, again unheard of, he adds.
“
Historically, presidents at the end of their mandate have focused on pardons and commutation of sentences,
” recalls Richard Dunham.
Before Donald Trump, no outgoing president "
has exercised his discretion to kill people rather than to spare them
."
