“There was no reason to kill him, particularly during the pandemic and when he, himself, was sick with Covid that he contracted because of these irresponsible, super-spreader executions.” ![]() “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,” Nolan said. In a statement after the execution, Higgs' attorney, Shawn Nolan, said his client had spent decades on death row helping other inmates and “working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions.” The federal judge who presided over Higgs' trial two decades ago said he “merits little compassion.” “He received a fair trial and was convicted and sentenced to death by a unanimous jury for a despicable crime,” US District Judge Peter Messitte wrote in a December 29 ruling. Higgs' lawyers argued it was “arbitrary and inequitable” to execute Higgs while Willis Haynes, the man who fired the shots that killed the women, was spared a death sentence. His death sentence was the first imposed in the modern era of the federal system in Maryland, which abolished the death penalty in 2013. ![]() In October 2000, a federal jury in Maryland convicted Higgs of first-degree murder and kidnapping in the killings of Tamika Black, 19 Mishann Chinn. Cleveland's was also the last presidency during which the number of civilians executed federally was in the double digits in one year, 1896, during Cleveland's second term. Not since the waning days of Grover Cleveland's presidency in the late 1800s has the US government executed federal inmates during a presidential transition, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
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