No stay of execution: AG Bill Barr schedules THREE more deaths by lethal injection before the Trump Administration is ousted - as Joe Biden vows to push legislation ending capital punishment at federal level
The Justice Department has scheduled three more federal executions before President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20.
The announcement was made in a court filing Friday night - just one day after the Bureau of Prisons carried out the eighth federal execution this year following a 17-year hiatus.
The Justice Department - which is headed up by Attorney General Bill Barr - says it is scheduling the executions of Alfred Bourgeois for December 11, Cory Johnson for January 14, and Dustin Higgs for January 15.
According to The New York Times, Biden 'has pledged to eliminate the death penalty. His campaign promised to work to pass legislation to end capital punishment on the federal level and incentivize states to follow suit.'
Some advocacy groups have called on the Trump administration to pause all executions until Biden takes office.
The Justice Department, headed up by AG Bill Barr , has scheduled three more federal executions before President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20
All three men who are scheduled to be executed have been convicted of heinous crimes.
Prosecutors say Bourgeois tortured, sexually molested his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, before beating her to death at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station in Texas in July 2002.
Court records say Bourgeois repeatedly beat the young girl and punched her in the face, whipped her with an electrical cord and beat her with a belt so hard that it broke. He also allegedly burned her feet with a cigarette lighter and hit her in the head with a baseball bat until her head swelled.
Meanwhile, Johnson was one of three crack cocaine dealers convicted over a string of murders which took place in 1992.
Prosecutors said he killed seven people in in an attempt to expand the territory of a Richmond, Virginia, gang and silence informants. His co-defendants James H. Roane Jr. and Richard Tipton, members of same drug gang, are also on death row.
Johnson's lawyers argue their client is intellectually disabled, and thus it would be unconstitutional to put him to death. The Supreme Court has held that it is unlawful to execute a person who is of such a low intelligence that they can´t function in society.
Johnson's lawyers claim that 'no jury or court has ever listened to the evidence at a hearing to decide if he has intellectual disability.'
'We are not aware of any other federal death penalty prisoner who has never had a single evidentiary hearing at which he could present his intellectual disability evidence. The government should not proceed with Mr. Johnson´s execution in the absence of a thorough and fair opportunity for him to present this evidence,' the lawyers, Ronald J. Tabak and Donald P. Salzman, said in a statement.
Barr is seen standing alongside President Trump in a photograph taken back in May
Meanwhile, Higgs was convicted of ordering the 1996 murders of three women at a federal wildlife center near Beltsville, Maryland. Prosecutors say Higgs and two others abducted the women after Higgs became enraged because one of the women rebuffed his advances at party.
Higgs' attorney, Sean Nolan, said his client didn't kill anyone, had ineffective attorneys and didn't deserve the death penalty.
Higgs' co-defendant, who prosecutors said carried out the killings, was not sentenced to death and Nolan said it is 'arbitrary and inequitable to punish Mr. Higgs more severely than the person who committed the murders.'
'Mr. Higgs deserves clemency because of the unfair sentencing disparity ... and because, despite the tragedy and hardship of his early life, he has been a model prisoner and is an active parent who is essential to the well-being of his son,' Nolan said.
This photo shows the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, where two of the three executions are scheduled to take place