Dustin higgs trial#

Haynes,” the prosecutor said, according to court records. Haynes you will see the choices that he makes in his life, and they suit only Mr. “When you look at the past behavior of Mr.

Dustin higgs trial#

During the 2000 trial of Haynes, the confessed shooter, the government argued that Haynes’s history of violence indicated he committed the murders of his own volition.

No one-not the government or his co-defendants in the case-contests the fact that Higgs did not kill the three women who were murdered. Twenty years later, Higgs is set to be the last person murdered by the Trump government despite the “troubling unfairness of his sentencing,” as his defense lawyer, Shawn Nolan, wrote in a statement. Higgs was convicted of three counts of first-degree premeditated murder, three counts of first-degree felony murder, and three counts of kidnapping resulting in death, and was given nine death sentences under the 1994 Crime Law. At his 2000 trial, a jury found that Higgs had handed Haynes a gun and demanded that he shoot the women. The three bodies were found in the federal refuge in the wee hours of the next morning. The six got into Higgs’s van to drop the women back off in D.C., but they ended up driving to Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, where Haynes shot the women. At some point in the night, a verbal argument occurred, and the women decided to leave.

The group of six then drove back to Higgs’s apartment in Maryland, where they partied for a few hours. to meet up with three young women-Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn. Higgs’ conviction story begins on a Friday night in January 1996, when he and two friends, Willis Haynes and Victor Gloria, drove from Maryland to Washington, D.C. President-elect Biden, who co-authored the draconian 1994 Crime Bill that’s helped the Trump administration carry out its executions, has now pledged to end federal killings, and the Democrats’ 2020 platform notes the party supports the abolition of the death penalty. 20 in a final flex of its lethal powers three over 96 hours in December and two more on back-to-back days in January. A presidential administration that has already killed so many people-eight by lethal injection and 264,000 more through COVID inaction-now plans to kill five more before Jan. history to kill more people in a single year than all the people put to death by the states that still practice capital punishment. Trump’s administration will be the first in U.S. 15, the birth date of Martin Luther King Jr., a fitting final statement of disregard for Black life from an administration defined by its racism. Dustin didn’t make me do anything that night or ever.” The government has attempted to justify its revenge killing of Higgs by claiming that he bullied Haynes into committing the murders, but in a 2012 signed affidavit, Haynes himself wrote that “the prosecution’s theory of our case was bullshit. The date of his killing, along with those of two other Black federal death-row prisoners, was announced by Attorney General Bill Barr in a last-minute press release that stated the three men are “ inmates sentenced to death for staggeringly brutal murders.”īut Higgs has killed no one, a fact confirmed by all witnesses, including co-defendant Willis Haynes, who pleaded guilty to fatally shooting the three victims in the 1996 case and was sentenced by a federal jury to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Dustin John Higgs is scheduled to be executed by the outgoing Trump administration just five days before the presidential inauguration of death-penalty opponent Joe Biden.