WASHINGTON – The Trump administration executed Corey Johnson on Thursday for a series of seven assassinations in 1992. He was the 12th federal prisoner killed under President Trump.
Mr. Johnson committed the killings in the Richmond, Virginia area to promote a drug company that traded large quantities of cocaine. Among his crimes were the shooting with a semi-automatic weapon of a rival drug dealer, the murder of a woman who did not pay for a little crack cocaine, and the shooting of a man nearby who Johnson suspected he cooperated with the police.
Mr. Johnson, 52, was pronounced dead at 11:34 a.m. by a lethal injection into the federal correctional complex in Terre Haute, India, the Bureau of Prisons said.
Asked on an executioner if he has any last words, Mr. Johnson replied, “No, I’m OK,” according to a report by a journalist present. A few seconds later, he said softly, “Love you,” and looked at a room designated for members of his family.
In a statement released by a spokesman for his defense team, Mr. Johnson apologized to the families victimized by his actions and listed the names of the seven murder victims and asked that they be remembered.
“On the street I was looking for shortcuts, I had some good role models, I was on the right track, I was blind and stupid,” he said. “I’m not the same man I was.”
Mr. Johnson thanked the chaplain, his minister, his legal team and the staff in the special detention unit. He remarked that ‘the pizza and strawberry shake was wonderful’, but that he never received the jelly-filled donuts he ordered, a reference to his last meal request. “What’s up with that?” he added. “It needs to be fixed.”
Mr. Johnson tested positive for the coronavirus last month, shortly after the government scheduled its execution, during an outbreak of the federal death struggle in the Terre Haute prison. At least 22 of the men housed there on the realm of the dead tested positive, advocates for inmates and others with knowledge of their cases said. Madeline Cohen, who represents two of the men, said she knows of 33 cases.
In a request for the execution of Mr. Johnson postponed, his lawyers said the virus had caused significant lung damage. They argued that his execution would violate the ban on the eighth amendment on cruel and unusual punishment, because he could experience a feeling of suffocation or drowning if killed according to the federal government’s method, which uses a single drug, pentobarbital , use. Instead, his lawyers suggested, Mr. Johnson is executed by a firing squad or the Bureau of Prisons may administer an analgesic before injecting pentobarbital.
Specifically, Johnson’s attorneys argued that the combination of the coronavirus and the government’s lethal injection protocol put him “especially at risk of experiencing pulmonary edema while still having sensations.” Flash pulmonary edema, a condition in which fluid rapidly accumulates in the lungs, was at the center of several challenges in the federal government’s implementation protocol. The courts were largely inadmissible for these claims.
But in short, it seemed as if the coronavirus for Mr. Johnson would give an extension. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered the execution of Mr. Johnson and another execution scheduled for Friday were suspended until at least March. Shortly afterwards, a panel of judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned the order.
Judge Gregory G. Katsas of the Court of Appeal, who was joined by another judge on the panel, quoted the precedent of the Supreme Court as saying that the eighth amendment does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death – something which, of course, does not guarantee many does not become. people. ‘”
In a case at the Supreme Court, the government contrasted its deadly injection protocol with death by hanging, claiming that hanging can cause suffocation that lasts several minutes. Even though coronavirus infections would make the execution of prisoners more painful, the government argued that the ‘transient pain’, probably measured in seconds or at most two minutes, would be much less than prisoners executed by hanging.
Mr. Johnson ‘is a convicted serial killer who killed and maimed several people on various occasions, and whose victims include innocent bystanders,’ the government said in a separate case at the Supreme Court. “Their families have been waiting decades for the sentence to be enforced and are currently in Terre Haute, India, for execution.”
A majority of the Supreme Court joined the government through Johnson’s requests to reject postponement.
Johnson’s lawyers also tried to challenge his execution, arguing that he was intellectually disabled and that it was illegal.
His allegations of intellectual disability were dismissed because an IQ score of 77 was too high to earn the diagnosis, his lawyers said. But they argued that results from other IQ tests and a modified version of the same score indicate that he qualified as mentally handicapped.
But to refute the claims, the justice department claims that the murders were planned, and not impulsive acts by someone who cannot deliver calculated verdicts. When the drug organization works in Trenton, NJ, for example, Mr. Johnson beat people with a metal bat to protect the business, the government said.
Lawyers for another man executed by the Trump administration in December – Alfred Bourgeois – also argued that their client was intellectually disabled. In both cases, the majority in the Supreme Court rejected the claims of the prisoners.
Two of Johnson’s attorneys still maintained that their client did not have the ability to be a drug lord, as portrayed by the government. In a statement, they said he could barely read or write, struggled with basic tasks of daily living and that he was a follower, desperate for approval, support and guidance. ‘
“No court has ever held a trial to consider the overwhelming evidence of Johnson’s mental retardation,” said attorneys Donald P. Salzman and Ronald J. Tabak. “And the process of grace could not play its historical role as a protection against transgressions of the proper process and the rule of law.”
Mr. Johnson was convicted of seven murders in 1993, among a number of other charges related to drug trafficking and violence. His lawyers argued in vain that he should get some respite under the First Step Act, a bill passed by Mr. Trump has been signed, which allows for shortened sentences for certain drug offenders, among other things.
Two other people involved in the conspiracy – Richard Tipton and James Roane – who traded large quantities of cocaine in the Richmond area in the early 1990s, were also sentenced to death.
Mr. Tipton and Mr. Roane remains in federal prison in Terre Haute. The justice department did not plan their executions.
Elected President Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose term begins Wednesday, has indicated his opposition to the federal death penalty, and therefore it is likely that they will be executed. Mr. Biden has pledged to pass legislation to end the federal death penalty as part of its criminal justice platform.
The Trump administration plans to execute its final prisoner, Dustin J. Higgs, on Friday. Mr. Higgs was sentenced to death for the murders of three women in Maryland in 1996. If his lawyers are unsuccessful and Mr. Trump will not forgive, Mr. Higgs’ death will be the 13th federal execution in a little over six months and the third this week. Lisa M. Montgomery, the only woman on federal death penalty, was killed Wednesday.
Since July, the number of inmates under a federal death sentence has dropped by about 20 percent due to the spate of executions carried out by the Trump administration, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. In that month, the government resumed the federal death penalty after a 17-year hiatus.