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Dustin Higgs, last convict scheduled to die under Trump, is executed - NBC News

Dustin Higgs, last convict scheduled to die under Trump, is executed - NBC News

Jan 16, 2021 1 min, 18 secs

The last federal prisoner to be put to death under the Trump administration was executed early Saturday at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Dustin Higgs, 48, was convicted in the 1996 kidnapping and killings of three women in a Maryland wildlife refuge.

Higgs, who was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m., was the thirteenth federal convict put to death under Trump.

They also noted his codefendant, Willis Haynes, was spared the death penalty.

President-elect Joe Biden, scheduled to be inaugurated Wednesday, opposes the federal death penalty and has signaled he’ll end its use.

The number of federal death sentences carried out under Trump since 2020 is more than in the previous 56 years combined, reducing the number of prisoners on federal death row by nearly a quarter.

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.

His death sentence was the first imposed in the modern era of the federal system in Maryland, which abolished the death penalty in 2013.

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.

Instead of taking them home, Higgs drove them to a secluded spot in the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, federal land in Laurel.

“Aware at that point that something was amiss, one of the women asked if they were going to have to ‘walk from here’ and Higgs responded ‘something like that,’” said an appeals court ruling upholding Higgs’s death sentence

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