Death sentence: As Trump leaves office, Liberal Supreme Court justices strike with unprecedented ‘rush’ of executions

Death sentence: As Trump leaves office, Liberal Supreme Court justices strike with unprecedented ‘rush’ of executions

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Late Friday night, over the fiery objection of two Supreme Court justices, Dustin John Higgs became the 13th federal prisoner to be killed. It was the last federal execution to take place under the Trump administration, which announced in July 2019 that it would restore the federal death penalty after a nearly two-decade hiatus. The then Attorney General William Barr said that his office owed it to the victims and their families to impose sentences imposed by the justice system.

But Judge Stephen Breyer – the only sitting judge who believes the court should reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty – and Judge Sonia Sotomayor tipped in a late-night order telling the details of all the executions.

“This is not justice,” Sotomayor wrote, pointing out that Higgs was the third federal execution in a week and the 13th overall.

Sotomayor drew her attention to all the executions: “To put it in historical terms, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months as in the previous six decades.”

She said the government should continue with a degree of self-control instead of dealing with an “unprecedented rush” amid questions about the Department of Justice’s drug protocol, the Federal Death Penalty Act and other disputes.

She also drew her attention to her conservative colleagues who, according to them, “repeatedly” sidestepped their usual deliberation processes so that the government could “proceed with an unprecedented, murderous timetable for executions”.

She went through many of the demands made and how lower court judges sometimes ruled in favor of the prisoners only to be overthrown. In particular, she noted that both inmates Corey Johnson and Higgs, who had already been executed this week, tested positive for Covid-19 in December.

“There can be no ‘justice going on’ in life and death cases,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet the court allowed the United States to execute thirteen people within six months under a legal scheme and regulatory protocol that received inadequate investigation, without resolving the serious claims made by the convicted individuals,” she said. .

While saying she was ‘respectfully’ different, she added: ‘Those who executed the government during this effort deserve more from this court.’

As for Breyer, now the most senior liberal on the court, he named each of the prisoners. He noted that a lower court judge was of the opinion that Higgs had suffered significant lung damage and that he would be executed by means of a pentobarbital injection due to his Covid-19 infection, a feeling of drowning such as waterboarding .

Breyer said the court has to deal with a myriad of questions, including whether the government’s protocol entails extreme pain and unnecessary suffering. He said all the claims filed – very last minutes – were not frivolous.

“What should courts do if we are faced with such legal issues?” he asked. “Are they supposed to ‘hurry up, hurry up?’ He again called for a reconsideration of the constitutionality of the death penalty itself.

Judge Elena Kagan also disagreed, but preferred not to join Sotomayor or Breyer or explain her thoughts separately.

Late Friday, the Conservative judges chose not to write, although the issue of the death penalty has generally caused heated debates among judges in the past.
In December 2019, the court rejected an appeal from the government when a judge in the district court temporarily blocked the federal government from carrying out executions. Judge Samuel Alito, along with Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, agreed to deny the emergency application, but said he believes the government will most likely eventually triumph in what Alito calls ‘extraordinarily heinous murders’. He asked the Court of Appeal to proceed with ‘appropriate dispatch’ to proceed with the case.

In his final appeal to the Supreme Court, Acting Attorney General Jeff Wall told the judges that Higgs received nine death sentences in 2001 “in connection with the cold-blooded murder of three women on federal ground near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. ” He said a lower court holding back the execution was “unprecedented and untenable” and that the execution should be allowed to continue.

“As this court has repeatedly emphasized,” Wall writes, “the government as well as the victims of crime have an important interest in the timely application of a death sentence.”

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