Today, Saturday, the US government carried out the latest death sentence under the administration of President Donald Trump, 5 days before President-elect Joe Biden entered the White House, who promised to work to abolish the death penalty at the federal level.

The Federal Prison Office stated - in a statement - that the death sentence was carried out against Dustin Higgs, 48, at 1:23 a.m. local time (06:23 p.m. GMT), and the Justice Department carried out the injection sentence in its prison in Terra Hot, Indiana.

And after 5 hours of preparing the Higgs to carry out the death sentence, the conservative majority in the US Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to proceed, and canceled a decision to postpone the ruling issued last Tuesday by a federal appeals court that justified its decision to delay because the man is infected with the virus, and he may suffer more the moment he is given the lethal injection .

Final words

Higgs was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 for his role in the kidnapping and killing of 3 women in a Federal Nature Reserve in Maryland in 1996. A journalist who attended the execution, as a media witness, says that Higgs, who was infected with "Covid-19" disease appeared calm and unafraid, he says. His last words, "I want to say that I am innocent," mentioned the three women by name, and "I did not order their killing."

One evening, in January 1996, Higgs had invited three young women to his apartment near Washington, as well as his two friends.

After one of them refused something he suggested to her, he brought them home, but stopped in an isolated federal reserve outside the city, and then ordered one of his friends to kill the three women, according to Ministry of Justice documents.

As for the person who shot the young women, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, without the possibility of obtaining parole.

"Punishing the Higgs more than the killer is arbitrary and unfair," said Higgs attorney Shaun Nolan, in a petition directed at President Trump, but Trump ignored this request.

The Supreme Court had refused to ratify an order issued by a lower court to postpone the execution of the man, and another convict named Corey Johnson, a killer with an intellectual disability, until they recovered from the new Corona virus, which they were infected with last December.

Executions resume

And Dustin Higgs is the 13th convict to whom the US government carries out the death sentence after resuming executions last year during the Trump era, after 17 years of the suspension of executions, and the US President had declared his support for the punishment long before he entered the political arena.

Before the Trump era, the federal government had only executed 3 convicts since 1963, and these executions at the federal level have nothing to do with the implementation of death sentences in some US states that operate with this punishment.

In a related context, the Ministry of Justice executed last Wednesday morning Lisa Montgomery, convicted of murder, the only woman who was awaiting execution of a death sentence issued by a federal court after the Supreme Court removed the last obstacle to execution.

The execution of Montgomery, 82, marks the first time that the US government has carried out a death sentence against a prisoner since 1953.

The woman was convicted in 2007 on charges of kidnapping and strangling Bobby Jo Stennett, who was eight months pregnant. Montgomery removed the fetus from Stennett's womb but survived.