![]() “I would like to be remembered as someone who transformed his mind and ultimately changed the dire circumstances of his family, all from a cell,” he wrote to me. Higgs learned to paint in prison, and has spent six years dreaming of selling his work. In the evenings he listens to music and paints until bed around 11pm. His afternoons are spent reading mail-“It seems like I am getting a lot of mail these days, believe me I am not complaining, it feels good to have the support”-and on conference calls with his attorneys. In what could be his final weeks, Higgs has been waking up around 4:30am each morning to pray and read the Qur’an, eat breakfast and then head to the prison’s law library, where he’s allotted about four hours each day to study case law and email with his family and friends. He had planned to leave the women there-alive-at the side of the road.” He said I had put him in a messed-up situation. ![]() Dustin didn’t make me do anything that night or ever,” Haynes wrote in an affidavit included in Higgs’ unsuccessful attempts to lobby the Obama Administration for clemency. “The prosecution’s theory of our case was bullshit. At the very least, Higgs’ attorneys argued in an unsuccessful appeal, this information could have resulted in a sentence of life in prison, not death. And only after Higgs was sentenced to death was his legal team made aware of a jailhouse witness who told prosecutors that Haynes killed the women because one of them owed him drug money. “My mothers death was nature's work while these murder were horrific and shouldn't have happen.”Īttorneys for Higgs have argued that he did not know that Haynes intended to kill the women. “The two worst times in my life is when I lost my mother at ten years old, and the murders.My mother was my everything, but, if I had the choice to change one event in my life I would bring back Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black, Mishann Chinn.” Higgs wrote to me. Higgs, meanwhile, received nine death sentences. Ultimately, Haynes-the shooter-was sentenced to life in prison after the first trial. ![]() The cases relied heavily on the testimony of Gloria, who had initially told police he was asleep during the shooting but eventually talked about what had happened in exchange for leniency. In the second, they claimed Haynes was scared of Higgs, who supposedly insisted Haynes commit the shootings. In the first trial, they argued Haynes was a calculated and cold blooded killer operating of his own volition. Both Haynes and Higgs faced murder trials, in which prosecutors advanced conflicting theories. While Maryland does not have the death penalty, the crime had technically been committed on federal land, opening the door for prosecutors to seek execution. The men followed the women out, offering a ride back home to Washington D.C., but instead drove them to a secluded area in the Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge, where Haynes shot and killed all three of them. According to prosecutors, Jackson and Higgs argued after she rebuffed one of his advances, prompting the women to leave. The women had spent the night partying at Higgs’ apartment along with him and two of his friends, Willis Haynes and Victor Gloria. There is also no dispute that Dustin Higgs was not the one who shot them. There is no disputing the horror of the January 1996 murders of Tanji Jackson, Tamika Black and Mishann Chinn. ![]() “There are many people who have been on death row for longer (than Higgs).” “It is kind of a random selection process and that should not be a part of our death penalty scheme or jurisprudence,” said Shawn Nolan, the attorney representing Higgs, who also works with other death row inmates. The prisoners selected were seemingly calibrated to be the least likely to prompt public outcry: The first wave were primarily inmates convicted of crimes against children the second, those convicted of multiple murders. Three of the ten killings so far were carried out after Trump lost the November election-the first federal executions during a lame duck period in more than a century. “And we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” “The Justice Department upholds the rule of law,” Barr declared in July. Higgs had been on death row for 20 years when, in late November, the Trump Administration announced its intent to kill him, four months after the administration resumed federal executions, a move championed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr. But, it is remarkable that with all this chaos going on with the Trump administration, that they are still so eager to move forward with three so-called executions.” “I doubt that Trump will lose his presidency in the final days. “I have been watching all the madness going on in D.C…” Higgs wrote to me last Thursday. ![]()
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