Shortly after 1 a.m. on Saturday, Dustin Higgs became the 13th person since July to be executed by the federal government. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had announced a 6-3 ruling that paved the way for the execution, but it was not without a sharp disagreement from Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
“After seventeen years without a single federal execution, the government has executed twelve people since July,” Sotomayor wrote in her opinion. “Today, Dustin Higgs turns thirteenth. To put it in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the past six months as in the previous six decades.”
As noted in Sotomayor’s opinion, the Federal Death Penal Code was enacted in 1994. By July 2020, only three people had been federally executed – two in 2001 and one in 2003.
After a 17-year hiatus, President Trump resumed federal executions in July 2020. By December, the U.S. government had executed more people within the year than all the states still executing.
Sotomayor wrote that over the past 7 months there has been an “unprecedented rush” of federal executions that has led to numerous legal disputes.
One such dispute, she writes, is that the government planned executions at such a rapid pace that those facing the executions had to challenge their sentences. In some cases, she writes, the courts have not had a chance to determine at first whether the executions were lawful.
“… the DOJ [Department of Justice] did not tread carefully, ‘Sotomayor wrote.’ Instead of allowing an orderly decision of these cases, the government consistently refused to postpone the executions and asked for emergency relief to continue before the courts had meaningful opportunities to determine whether the executions were even legal. ”
Higgs was convicted in 1996 of kidnapping and ordering the murder of three women. His lawyers called for the execution to be postponed because they claimed Higgs’ lungs were damaged after contracting COVID-19, claiming that the execution “would have a drowning-like feeling.”
“This is not justice,” Sotomayor continued. “… Yet the court allowed the United States to execute thirteen people within six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that received insufficient investigation, without resolving the serious claims raised by the convicted individuals. “Those who carried out the government during this effort” deserve more from this court. “