Execution set during Trump’s final days

As with many death row inmates, the final days before Dustin John Higgs’ scheduled execution Jan. 15 are marked by a flurry of last-minute legal appeals to spare his life.

But the fate of Higgs, 48, convicted of murdering three women in Prince George’s County in 1996, hinges as well on the two inescapable events currently roiling the country: the chaotic end of the presidency of Donald Trump and the raging coronavirus pandemic.

Higgs was tried and sentenced by federal rather than state authorities because his crime occurred on U.S.-owned land. He is among a group whose executions were ordered last year by the Trump administration, breaking a 17-year moratorium on putting federal inmates to death.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to abolish the federal death penalty. That Higgs’ execution is scheduled just five days before Biden takes office adds to what his son calls a “roller coaster” of emotions as the date approaches.

“Trump’s administration is just rushing it,” said Da’Quan Darby, Higgs’ 24-year-old son. “It’s crazy they have him getting executed right before Biden is in.

“If we could just get one more day,” Darby said.

Born the year the three women were killed, he has seen Higgs over the years only in contactless visits separated by a partition at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, which houses the federal death row.

Higgs, sentenced in October 2000, was the first Marylander to receive the federal death penalty. Relatives of the women he was convicted of murdering praised the sentence as just at the time.

“As terrible as this crime was, I thank God that justice was served,” said Joyce Gaston, mother of Tamika Black, who was 19 when she was killed. Gaston could not be reached for comment for this article.

But Higgs’ supporters have long argued that his sentence was unjust because he did not shoot the three women himself. Rather, prosecutors said, he ordered another man to do it. That man, who has since denied that he acted at Higgs’ behest, received a life sentence.

While Higgs filed various appeals over the years, those efforts stepped up after then-Attorney General William Barr announced the administration would resume federal executions, which had unofficially been discontinued as litigation created delays and pharmaceutical companies refused to sell their drugs for use in lethal injections. The July 2019 announcement prompted further legal challenges, but by last summer, the Supreme Court had paved the way for executions to begin.

By July, when the first federal inmate since 2003 was executed — followed by nine more by year’s end — the coronavirus was firmly entrenched in the U.S., spreading particularly rapidly in congregate living facilities such as prisons.

Higgs tested positive for COVID-19 last month, a diagnosis that figures in a case, currently awaiting a ruling, seeking to delay his execution. COVID, his lawyers argue, has caused lung damage that puts him at greater risk of painful pulmonary edema, the flooding of fluid into the lungs, when he is given the lethal injection. They argue that would violate his constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.