'Rush to kill convicts': US Supreme Court judges slam federal executions

Two liberal judges of the US Supreme Court have lambasted the Donald Trump administration for carrying out 13th and the final federal execution days before the President leaves office. Trump’s Justice Department executed Dustin John Higgs by giving him lethal injection on January 15, just days before Joe Biden steps in with a promise to permanently end death penalties. Higgs who was convicted of killing three women in Maryland in 1996 had argued that he was innocent and even filed an eleventh-hour clemency appeal.

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Read: US Justice Department Announces 13th And Final Federal Execution Under Trump Admin

In the aftermath, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer asserted that the Trump administration seemed to be in a 'rush to kill' all those convicted. In an order issued on Friday, January 16, Sotomayor excoriated the execution writing that it was not justice. Appointed by Obama, Sotomayor said that she saw “an unprecedented rush” to kill condemned inmates in the incumbent’s last days.

"To put that in historical context, the federal government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades,” she wrote.

All 13 executions have taken place since July 2020. Breyer, a fellow liberal on the nine-justice high court, was equally scathing, naming each of the 13 executed prisoners and noting a lower court’s observation that Higgs had significant lung damage. In a blistering speech, he questioned execution protocols asking whether the protocols risked extreme pain and suffering and pressured the court into last-minute decisions on matters of life and death.

Read: US Justice Department Announces 13th And Final Federal Execution Under Trump Admin

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'Higgs was a fine man'

On January 15, the Trump administration carried out its 13th and final federal execution of prisoner Dustin Higgs, accused of killing three women in Maryland in 1996. The US government’s execution, which came in a span of six months, was pronounced by the federal court just four days ahead of president-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. In a statement to AP, an attorney for Higgs, Shawn Nolan defended Higgs as  “a fine man, a terrific father, brother, and nephew” who “spent decades on death row in solitary confinement helping others around him, while working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions.”