Before dawn the next morning, an argument between Higgs and Jackson prompted her to grab a knife in the kitchen before Haynes persuaded her to drop it. Dustin Higgs guilty on 15 counts for the first-degree murder and kidnapping of Tamika.
26, 1996, when he, Haynes and a third man, Victor Gloria, picked up the three women in Washington, D.C., and drove them to Higgs’ apartment in Laurel, Maryland, to drink alcohol and listen to music. § 3596 (a), and make clear that the execution may proceed as scheduled on Jan. Higgs’s difficult upbringing was not meaningfully presented to the jury at trial,” his attorneys wrote. Issue: Whether the Supreme Court should direct a federal district court in Maryland to designate Indiana as the alternate state whose law shall prescribe the manner of executing Dustin Higgs under 18 U.S.C. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, the petition said. 19 petition for clemency argued he had been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born shortly after his arrest. “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. Higgs’ execution was a miscarriage of justice for a number of issues. And after seventeen years without a single federal execution. His death sentence was the first imposed in the modern era of the federal system in Maryland, which abolished the death penalty in 2013. The Supreme Court allowed the execution of Dustin Higgs late Friday, making Higgs the thirteenth person to be killed by the federal government since July. 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. It’s likely none of the around 50 remaining men will be executed anytime soon, with Biden signaling he’ll end federal executions. 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. Dustin Higgs was convicted and sentenced to the federal death penalty as an accomplice to the 1996 murders of Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn. No president in more than 120 years had overseen as many federal executions. Trump’s Justice Department resumed federal executions last year following a 17-year hiatus. "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." Dustin Higgs at the Federal Prison in Terre Haute, Ind., in 2015. "Today, Dustin Higgs will become the thirteenth," she continued.