![]() ![]() “What are courts to do when faced with legal questions of this kind?” he wrote. He said the court needed to address whether execution protocols risked extreme pain and needless suffering and pressured the courts into last-minute decisions on life or death. The lethal injection of pentobarbital, Breyer said, would “subject him to a sensation of drowning akin to waterboarding”. “Yet the court has allowed the United States to execute 13 people in six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that have received inadequate scrutiny, without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised.”īreyer, a fellow liberal on the nine-justice high court, was equally scathing, naming each of the 13 executed prisoners and noting a lower court’s observation that Higgs had significant lung damage. “There can be no ‘justice on the fly’ in matters of life and death,” Sotomayor added. “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,” she wrote. The government executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than in the previous six decades Sonia Sotomayor All 13 executions have taken place since July 2020. Sotomayor, who was critical of the Trump administration’s July 2019 announcement that it would resume federal executions after a two-decade hiatus, condemned what she saw as “an unprecedented rush” to kill condemned inmates. “This was not justice,” Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in an order issued late on Friday. Willis Haynes was convicted of the same crime but sentenced to life. Higgs, 48, was convicted of murdering three women at a Maryland wildlife refuge in 1996, even though it was an accomplice who fired the fatal shots. Dustin John Higgs died by lethal injection at the federal correctional institute in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Friday night, after his 11th-hour clemency appeal was rejected.
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