11 January 21
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RSN: Barbara Koeppel | 725,000 Petition President, DOJ to Stop the Killings
Barbara Koeppel, Reader Supported News
Koeppel writes: "President Trump and his Department of Justice will take their final bows in a blaze of bloodletting. This week, the last three of 13 death row prisoners will be executed. The other ten were executed from July through early December."
The administration’s timing is unabashedly political, since Trump et al. want a done deal before Biden (known to oppose the death penalty) takes the helm. They also want to give a parting gift to the Republican base and champion their law and order credentials. In fact, since all 13 prisoners had been on death row for over two decades, it is crucial to question the timing.
The only good news is that although 61 percent of White Americans still support the death penalty, the number of those opposing it is mushrooming: Over 500,000 Americans signed a Death Penalty Action (an anti-death penalty group) petition to stop the three executions scheduled for this week.
According to Abe Bonowitz, the group’s director, the reason so many signed the petition is that they were repulsed by the administration’s goal to kill as many as possible before January 20. The half-million names are even more remarkable since they were collected in less than a month – starting the day after the tenth execution was carried out on December 11.
Bonowitz says, “We delivered the petitions to the Department of Justice and the President. As of today, neither has responded.”
Equally remarkable, another group, “Save Dustin Higgs,” collected about 275,300 petitions in only four weeks. Higgs, a Black man, is slated to die this Friday, January 15, which happens to be Martin Luther King’s birthday. The symbolism is striking – since King preached nonviolence until the day he was assassinated.
Higgs (who has written a children’s book and essays while on death row) was convicted of shooting three women in 1993. At his trial, the prosecution argued that although Higgs was driving the car when the women were shot, it was Higgs who ordered his friend, Willis Haynes, to kill them. Like the details in a John Grisham novel, Haynes swore this wasn’t true – that Higgs didn’t order him to do it. Also, all the witnesses claimed that Higgs didn’t pull the trigger. But neither the jury nor judge listened. Haynes was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison. Higgs was convicted and sentenced to die.
Why the discrepancy? Shawn Nolan, Higgs’s lawyer, says “Haynes’s case came first, and the jury didn’t recommend the death penalty. Higgs’s case followed, and the court was determined to get a death sentence.” (Still more Grisham-like details.)
Nolan is asking Judge Tanya Chutkan in the D.C. Federal District Court for a preliminary injunction to stop the execution. “My client has Covid-19 and an X-ray shows the virus has severely damaged his lungs. If he gets injected with pentobarbital, the drug used in the executions, it will be like water-boarding him, torturing him to death.” Nolan says that if Judge Chutkan denies the request, he’ll appeal to the Circuit Court of D.C. If that fails, he’ll appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. He has no idea what they’ll decide.
This past Saturday, on a bitterly cold afternoon, Higgs’s family and friends, along with the families of other men on death row, gathered at the Martin Luther King memorial (in Washington, D.C.) to console each other and protest the killings.
The sun shining on the larger-than-life King statue was stark, as was the irony that Higgs will be executed on King’s birthday: either the Department of Justice knows this and chose the date as the administration’s last hurrah, or possibly in Barr and Rosen’s DOJ no one even noticed the symbolism.
In fact, the rash of executions had such high priority that the top two men at DOJ – former attorney general William Barr and his deputy, Jeffrey Rosen, who now heads the department – personally took on the task of choosing who would die. Early in 2020, they made a list to pick the 12 men and one woman out of the 62 on death row to execute. Their rationale was these 13 were the “worst of the worst.”
Who are the remaining two (besides Higgs)? There’s Lisa Montgomery, who will be executed Tuesday afternoon. Montgomery suffers from such severe mental illness that she isn’t aware of her surroundings. Also, she suffers a past crippled by constant sexual abuse from age seven onwards; her mother and step-father prostituted her in a special room they built alongside their house for the clients.
The other is Cory Johnson, who will die on January 14. In 1992, when he was 23, he was convicted of killing rival gang members. Johnson’s IQ is somewhere between 70 and 75, which means he’s intellectually disabled. Although a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision barred the death penalty for those with such low IQs, neither the jury nor the judge heard this evidence.
As the clock ticks down to Tuesday afternoon, various groups are making last-ditch efforts to block the bloodlust. Charlie Sullivan, president of International CURE (a prison reform group) and a former priest, has asked people to contact Everett Kelley, president of AFGE, the umbrella national union for the correctional officers’ union, to urge his members to refuse to take part in the executions. Sullivan says they have a right to decline.
He adds that “during the Vietnam War, we used to say that you couldn’t have a war if no one showed up. And it’s the same now. You can’t have an execution if no one is there to carry it out.” Kelley has yet to respond.
John Clark, a former officer in the AFGE Bureau of Prisons Union in Michigan and former warden at two federal prisons, petitioned Kelley to “publicly encourage members at Terre Haute to decline to participate in the killing of three prisoners this week. Executions go against the best human values.… And I know from staff and administrators that they put an unfair and permanent emotional burden on those who are involved.”
Barbara Koeppel is a Washington DC-based investigative reporter who covers social, economic, military, political, foreign policy and whistleblower issues.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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