The remaining federal inmates include the death of Lisa Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on the federal death sentence, and the first to be executed in the United States in nearly 70 years; Brandon Bernard, who will be the youngest man in nearly 70 years to be executed by the United States for a crime committed as a teenager; and Dustin Higgs, who was convicted of ordering triple homicide when he was sentenced to life in armed prison.
The Department of Justice and the White House have rejected the urgency of scheduling this number of federal executions.
The Biden campaign spoke out against the federal death penalty, in part because of the illegally convicted detainees who received these punishments.
Since 1973, 172 people have been convicted illegally in state court, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a national nonprofit that has been monitoring and studying death penalty cases across the country for 30 years. The demographics of the 172 candidates were 89 black men, 63 white men, 15 Latin men, an indigenous American man, two other men of another race, and a black woman and a white woman.. No federal death sentences were found, they were wrongfully convicted, Dunham said.
There are currently 54 people on federal death sentences: 24 black men, 21 white men, seven Latinos, one Asian and one white woman, writes the Death Penalty Information Center. Of the eight executed so far this year, six were white and two were black men.
Legal representatives from the Fair and Just Prosecution Service included the abolition of the federal death penalty in the Biden-Harris government’s list of recommendations for reforming the criminal justice system.
“Undoubtedly, this unprecedented execution makes it clear that this system needs either the death penalty or a major overhaul. It also shows that the moratorium is just kicking the can on the road,” Dunham said, adding: ” The previous administrations, the Obama-Biden administration, have failed to act in these cases, which have created the conditions under which you could receive this unparalleled series of executions. ”
“It’s not a question of whether these crimes were horrible, but that’s not the question,” Dunham said. “By pointing down the list of these executions one by one, you can present the injustices.”
These are the remaining death row inmates scheduled for execution before the date of enlistment:
• Alfred Bourgeois sentenced a black man to death by a Texas jury in 2002 for abusing, torturing and eventually beating his daughter to death. Citizenship attorney Victor Abreu said in a statement on Friday that his client was scheduled for Dec. 11. After the Supreme Court ruled that another death sentence could not be carried out because of his intellectual disability, Abreu is seeking to try to present similar evidence in Bourgeois ’case.
• A black man, Corey Johnson, is scheduled to be executed on Jan. 14 for killing seven people in 1992 as part of a Virginia drug trade. Johnson’s attorneys, Ronald J. Tabak and Donald P. Salzman, argue that no jury has heard evidence of his intellectual disability. According to Johnson’s attorneys, his IQ is 69, which would be lower than the standard recommended by the Supreme Court to serve as a guide for states considering whether such enforcement meets the cruel and unusual punitive standards of the Constitution. Johnson’s companion was sentenced to life imprisonment for his own intellectual disability.
• On Jan. 15, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the federal government is expected to execute Dustin Higgs, a black man sentenced to death “despite not killing anyone,” his lawyer, Shawn Nolan, said in a statement after Justice. Department announcement on Friday. Higgs’ second accused and convicted person were given unconditional lives for the 1996 murder of three women in Maryland. Higgs was convicted on the basis that, despite not pulling the trigger, he ordered the killings, his lawyer said. One of the defendants testified that Higgs had indeed ordered the shootings.
