Dustin Higgs was executed days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who says he will work to end the federal death penalty. (PHOTO PROVIDED BY COUNSEL FOR DUSTIN HIGGS)
The 48-year-old Maryland man maintained his innocence up until his death. He was the 13th and final person executed during Trump’s term.
By Melissa Jeltsen and Jessica Schulberg, HuffPost
The Trump administration executed Dustin Higgs, 48, early Saturday morning, shortly after the Supreme Court lifted a stay from a lower court.
The government killed Higgs with a lethal injection of pentobarbital, over objections by his lawyers that lung damage from his recent bout of COVID-19 could make the execution extraordinarily painful. They had asked that the execution be delayed until his lungs recovered.
Mentally ill woman executed as Trump continues federal killing spree
In a continuation of Donald Trump’s cruel killing spree, Lisa Montgomery, 52, a woman convicted for the murder a pregnant woman in 2004 and the kidnapping of her premature baby, was executed early January 13 and pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m.
Montgomery’s execution followed US Supreme Court rulings in four separate cases allowing it to go forward. Montgomery became the eleventh person to be executed following the Trump administration’s ending of a 17-year de facto moratorium on federal executions.
Lisa Montgomery (Photo: Wyandotte County Sheriff s Department)
According to Montgomery’s defense team, she was transported shackled from a federal medical center to a federal execution facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, where she was put to death by a single dose of pentobarbital.
Melissa Jeltsen, Jessica Schulberg
January 11, 2021, 2:45 AM
Since President Donald Trump incited violent rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol last week, lawmakers and members of his own Cabinet have mulled whether he’s too dangerous to complete the final days of his presidency. Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat have decided he’s currently unfit to operate social media accounts on their platform.
But he still has the power to kill.
During his last full week as president, the Trump administration plans to execute three people on death row, capping a historically unprecedented six-month execution spree. The people scheduled for execution just days before the inauguration of a president who opposes the death penalty include a woman with a mental illness untreated at the time of her crime, a man with an intellectual disability that should render him ineligible for execution, and a man who did not pull the trigger in the killing he was convicted of.
Trump administration’s state-sponsored killing spree continues with two more federal executions
As Donald Trump presides over a pandemic that has so far claimed the lives of more than 300,000 Americans, his administration is rushing through the executions of five more federal death row prisoners before January 20. This accelerated state killing spree claimed the life of one inmate on Thursday and another on Friday, with three more scheduled the week before Inauguration Day.
Trump’s Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr is proceeding with a blood-thirsty disregard for life that is in keeping with the administration’s homicidal “herd immunity” policy, which is taking the lives of thousands of people a day as millions of workers are forced into COVID-ridden workplaces and students and teachers are sent into dangerously unsafe schools.