Dustin Higgs: Man convicted of kidnapping, raping and killing 3 women is final inmate executed under Trump's rule
Convicted murderer Dustin Higgs was executed on Saturday, January 16, morning. The 48-year-old was given the lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 1:23 am local time at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. This makes him the 13th and final federal death row inmate to be executed under the Trump administration, following convicts Lisa Montgomery and Corey Johnson who died earlier this week.
He maintained his innocence till the time of his death. His last words were "I'd like to say I am an innocent man," he said mentioning the three women by name that he was believed to have killed, kidnapped and murdered. "I did not order the murders," he said in a calm yet defiant voice, CNN states citing reports.
Higgs' victims were 19-year-old Tamika Black, 21-year-old Tanji Jackson and 23-year-old Mishann Chinn. All crimes were committed in Maryland. Higgs denied his crimes stating that it wasn't him but another man named Willis Haynes who had pulled the trigger on these women.
Higgs' attorney, Shawn Nolan released a statement after the execution in which he said that his client had spent "decades on death row helping other inmates and working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions."
Nolan added, "The government completed its unprecedented slaughter of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a Black man who never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King's birthday." In the statement, Nolan further said, "There was no reason to kill him, particularly during the pandemic and when he, himself, was sick with Covid-19 that he contracted because of these irresponsible, super-spreader executions."
Nolan had appealed to delay the execution because of Higgs' Covid-19 diagnosis and also argued that this was unfair sentencing since Willis Haynes is already serving a life sentence.
The prosecution alleged that Higgs was the one to threaten Haynes and warn him that he'd "better make sure they're dead" while handing over the gun. However, in 2012, Haynes denied that anything of this sort had taken place and called the idea "bullsh*t" in a clemency petition for Higgs, according to The Sun. On a website that was created by his supporters, Higgs argued that he wasn't the one to pull the trigger and that he could never order such a thing, to begin with.
“I wonder if it's that I'm not yelling loud enough, or is it that the blatant miscarriage of justice of me being killed for a crime I'm certainly innocent of really doesn't matter,” he wrote on the site. In an affidavit written by Haynes for Higgs during Obama's presidency, he wrote, "Dustin didn’t threaten me. I was not scared of him. Dustin didn’t make me do anything that night or ever."
Higgs' journey to death row began in January 1996 when he, Haynes and another friend Victor Gloria drove from Washington, DC, to Maryland to pick up the three women. Higgs had invited them to his apartment in Laurel, Maryland, and once inside, he began making advances towards Jackson. She rejected the same and all the girls banded to leave the house together.
Higgs offered to take the women back to Washington but instead brought them to a secluded area in the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge. He ordered them to get out of the vehicle and handed over a gun to Haynes. Higgs's attorneys argued that Haynes was the sole shooter in this case and that their client did not kill anyone nor did he order the killings.
Higgs' was initially scheduled to be executed on January 18, marking the 92nd birthday of Rev Martin Luther King Jr. King's oldest son, Martin Luther King III, wrote an op-ed on Thursday, January 14, in The Washington Post calling for the end to executions by quoting his father's words from 1957.
When asked if God approves of the death penalty, King had said, "I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime ... capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God."
President Donald Trump's Justice Department reinstituted federal executions last year following a 17-year-old hiatus. Higgs' execution has taken place a week before President-elect Joe Biden's inaugural. He does not support the federal death penalty and is expected to ban executions once he assumes office.