Yesterday Dustin Higgs was executed at the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, IN. He was the 13th death row inmate to be killed since July 2020 and the third to be killed in Trump’s final week as President.
The whole business has a queer, Republican smell about it. No honest pharmaceutical firm would supply the poison, so it was obtained from a secret supplier. Someone decided not to have employees of the federal government act as executioners, so the execution was carried out by “contractors” who were paid in cash. (I thought contract executioners were found only in the underworld.)
A lot of deceit was fired off in defense of these murders. The Justice Department proclaimed “Seeking the death penalty and carrying out capital sentences is not a political issue, nor have political considerations influenced the department’s decisions.” Clearly the Justice Department thinks we are all astonishingly gullible, or else it is simply without shame. Bill Barr himself played the family card, “we owe it to the victims and their families.” I don’t know how much these executions cheered up the victims or what they could do for the families except satisfy a need for revenge.
These executions were brought to us by a coalition of pro-life supporters: contributions from an unimaginably greedy President, an enslaved Department of Justice, a compromised Supreme Court, a manipulative Republican Party, and a host of false Christians made these murders possible.