Dustin Higgs, who was sentenced to demise for his function in a triple homicide, was executed Saturday morning, turning into the ultimate individual executed by the Trump administration, simply 4 days earlier than Joe Biden takes workplace.
Final month, Higgs appealed to President Trump for clemency, arguing that he ought to be spared as a result of he didn’t truly pull the set off within the homicide of three ladies in 1996. The shooter “was tried individually and sentenced to life in jail with out the potential for launch,” Higgs’ attorneys argued. “It’s arbitrary and inequitable to punish Mr. Higgs extra severely than the precise killer.”
Because the Justice Division revived capital punishment on the federal degree in 2019, 13 prisoners, together with Higgs, have been executed. Within the days previous his demise, two different federal demise row prisoners, Corey Johnson and Lisa Montgomery, had been additionally executed.
Earlier than the Trump administration reinstituted the demise penalty, it had not been used on the federal degree for practically twenty years. As my colleague, Nathalie Baptiste, reported final month:
Trump has enacted the fewest pardons and commutations of any president in 100 years. However he’s carried out probably the most executions by resuming the federal demise penalty and has grow to be the primary lame duck president to execute inmates in 130 years. For the primary time ever, the federal authorities carried out extra executions than all of the states mixed.
Biden, as soon as a longtime supporter of the demise penalty, now has as a plank of his felony justice platform that he’ll remove the demise penalty on the federal degree and “incentivize states to observe the federal authorities’s instance.” In a fall Gallup ballot, solely 55 p.c of People mentioned they assist utilizing the demise penalty as punishment for homicide, decrease than at any level because the early Seventies.