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. His death sentence was the first imposed in the modern era of the federal system in Maryland, which abolished the death penalty in 2013. 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. Higgs’s difficult upbringing was not meaningfully presented to the jury at trial," his attorneys wrote. Higgs had a traumatic childhood and lost his mother to cancer when he was 10, the petition says. 19 petition for clemency says he has been a model prisoner and dedicated father to a son born shortly after his arrest. “And particularly for Dustin, who didn’t shoot anybody. “In the midst of the pandemic and everything that’s going on right now in the country, it seems just insane to move forward with these executions," Nolan said recently. A spokesman for Biden has said the Democrat is against the death penalty and will work to end its use. Higgs is scheduled to be executed five days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Shawn Nolan, one of Higgs’ attorneys, sees a clear political agenda in the unprecedented string of federal executions at the end of Trump’s presidency. But higher courts overruled those decisions, allowing the executions to go forward, and Johnson was executed Thursday night. Defense attorneys won temporary stays of execution this week for Higgs and another inmate, Corey Johnson, after arguing that their recent COVID-19 infections put them at greater risk of unnecessary suffering during the lethal injections.
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