A federal inmate scheduled to be executed in January tested positive for COVID-19, his lawyer said.
The Bureau of Prisons notified Dustin John Higgs’s attorneys that he had tested positive for the virus, his attorney Devon Porter said during a court hearing Thursday, according to the Associated Press.
Higgs’s diagnosis is the latest in an outbreak among inmates at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. As of Thursday, there were more than 300 inmates with confirmed cases of COVID-19, while the Bureau of Prisons said “many of these inmates are asymptomatic or exhibiting mild symptoms.”
“This is surely the result of the super spreader executions that the government has rushed to undertake in the heart of a global pandemic. Following the two executions that took place last week and one other two weeks prior, the COVID numbers at the federal prison in Terre Haute spiked enormously,” one of Higgs’s lawyers, Shawn Nolan, said in a statement. “Now our client is sick. We have asked the government to withdraw the execution date and we will ask the courts to intervene if they do not.”
He is the latest in a string of federal executions that were greenlighted in 2019 by Attorney General William Barr, but it’s unclear how his diagnosis could affect the execution. The executions have continued through the lame duck period of President Trump’s administration.
Ten people have been executed under the Trump administration, which is the most since the presidency of Grover Cleveland in the 1890s. Higgs, whose execution is scheduled for Jan. 15, only five days before President-elect Joe Biden is sworn into office, will be the final death row inmate to be executed under the Trump administration.
Higgs was convicted in 2000 of the kidnapping and murder of three women in 1996, when he offered the women a ride home after being rejected by one of them at a party. Instead, he drove them to a secluded road and ordered his friend to kill them, which he did by shooting two in the chest and one in the back of the head.
