The government killed Dustin Higgs after the Supreme Court late Friday reversed lower-court orders that had put the execution on hold and drawing strongly worded dissents from two justices (article available here).
In a brief, unsigned ruling issued around 11 p.m., the justices reversed a federal district court that had ruled it lacked the authority to green-light the execution. The justices then bypassed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which had granted a stay of execution this week to allow time for that court to consider the final legal issue in the case. The court’s ruling was highly unusual, which Justice Sotomayor called an "unprecedented rush."
Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan indicated that they would not have permitted the execution to go forward. Breyer and Sotomayor each wrote dissents lamenting the recent flurry of executions – and the court’s role in allowing them to happen. In the past six months, the federal government executed 13 people, and it prevailed in every death-penalty appeal that reached the Supreme Court during that time.
“After waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “When it did not, this Court should have. It has not.”
Breyer condemned the “hurry up, hurry up” approach in this case and in other recent death penalty appeals. “How just is a legal system that would execute an individual without consideration of a novel or significant legal question that he has raised?” Breyer wrote.
Higgs, 48, was given a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. on Saturday morning.
In a statement following the execution, an attorney for Higgs, called him "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." He added, "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."