A panel of federal judges has ordered that Dustin Higgs, 48, convicted in a Maryland triple homicide in 1996, be executed as scheduled on Friday, which might make him the final federal inmate to be put to dying below President Donald Trump as he leaves workplace, the Baltimore Sun reports. Higgs’ attorneys challenged the choice on Thursday amongst what’s more likely to be a collection of last-minute appeals over the scheduled executions of Higgs and one other federal inmate, Cory Johnson, 52, convicted of drug-related murders in Virginia. Higgs and Johnson had received a delay of their executions on Tuesday when a federal decide in Washington, D.C., agreed with their attorneys that their current diagnoses of COVID-19 made them extra susceptible to struggling waterboard-like ache when the deadly injection is run and earlier than it kills them. Decide Tanya Chutkan ordered their executions delayed till March 16.
U.S. Division of Justice attorneys rapidly appealed, and two appellate judges, Gregory Katsas and Justin Walker, ordered the delay lifted, over the dissent of their colleague Cornelia Pillard. Johnson was scheduled to be executed on Thursday, adopted by Higgs on Friday. They might be the twelfth and thirteenth killed for the reason that Trump administration resumed federal executions in July after a 17-year hiatus. Early Wednesday morning, after an identical flurry of last-minute appeals, Lisa Montgomery, 52, was executed, the primary lady to be put to dying federally for the reason that Fifties. The COVID-19 pandemic has added to the turmoil because it has created outbreaks in prisons such because the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, In., web site of the federal dying row, and plenty of of these concerned within the executions have contracted the illness. “It’s time for the federal government to cease finishing up super-spreader executions,” mentioned Higgs’ public defender, Shawn Nolan.
