Content warning: This article contains references to child sexual abuse.
When Donald Trump leaves the White House next week, he will have presided over more federal executions than almost any other US president in the country’s history.
The Trump administration has pushed ahead with federal executions following his November election defeat, in defiance of a 131-year tradition that outgoing presidents suspend the practice during the transition period.
In just months the administration has overseen 11 deaths, with federal executions carried out at an unprecedented rate after being resumed in July of last year.
In a historic first, the US federal government in 2020 put more people to death than all the states combined, with state-level use of capital punishment falling to its lowest point since 1983, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.
Another two executions are planned before Joe Biden takes over the presidency, with Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs due to receive lethal injections - despite fierce objections from lawyers and activists.
Should this occur, some 26 per cent of all federal executions since 1927 will have been conducted in less than seven months, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The situation prompted Amnesty International Australia to write to Foreign Minister Marise Payne earlier this month, asking her to urge Mr Trump to call the remaining executions off.
National director Sam Klintworth wrote that 13 executions in seven months was “staggering” and “unprecedented”, with only three federal executions taking place in the US between 1977 and June 2020.
People gather to protest the resumption of federal executions near the US Penitentiary and execution chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, in July 2020. Source: AAP
"The resort to executions as shown in recent months has not only put the spotlight on the unjust flaws and arbitrariness that have long affected the USA death penalty system, but also failures on the part of the Trump administration to uphold safeguards and restrictions established under international law,” Ms Klintworth said.
Mr Trump, a supporter of the death penalty, has not intervened in any capital case.
But President-elect Joe Biden opposes the death penalty and has criticised last year's resumption of federal executions following a two-decade moratorium. He has promised to work with Congress to try to abolish it federally.
'A litany of firsts'
Those executed since July include former white supremacist , 47, who was the first put to death in July over the 1996 murders of a family of three.
Meanwhile, Orlando Hall, 49 was over the kidnapping, rape and murder of 16-year-old Lisa Rene, despite his lawyers’ argument that his trial was tainted by racism.
Brandon Bernard, 40, was for his role in a double murder committed in Texas when he was 18 years old, following pleas for clemency from advocates including reality star Kim Kardashian.
And just this week, in what marked the first time the US government has implemented the death sentence for a female prisoner since 1953.
Montgomery, 52, was convicted in 2007 for kidnapping and strangling pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett. Montgomery cut Ms Stinnett's fetus from the womb, but the child survived.
Challenges were fought across multiple federal courts on whether to allow Montgomery's death, with her lawyers saying their mentally-ill client committed her crime after a childhood in which she was abused and repeatedly raped by her stepfather and his friends.
Saul Lehrfreund, co-executive director of the The Death Penalty Project, that the federal executions carried out in 2020 showed "a total disregard for political precedent and human rights and created a litany of firsts".
Lisa Montgomery, who was executed this week. Source: Attorneys for Lisa Montgomery
"The killings included the first Native American ever executed by the federal government for the murder of a member of his own tribe on tribal lands, the first federal executions of teenage offenders for 68 years, and the first federal execution in 57 years for a crime committed in a state that had abolished the death penalty," he wrote.
Now, in the dying days of Mr Trump's presidency, lawyers are fighting the federal executions of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs, with last-ditch court challenges underway to save them.
Johnson was part of a gang implicated in 10 murders in 1992, and has been convicted in federal court for his involvement in seven of them.
The 52-year-old is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Friday night, unless the Supreme Court grants him a last-minute stay.
The next day, authorities plan to execute Higgs, a 48-year-old convicted of kidnapping and killing three young women on federal land near Washington in 1996.
Both men contracted COVID-19 in December, and a judge decided Tuesday postpone their executions for several weeks to allow them to heal, siding with medical experts who said their damaged lungs would result in inordinate suffering if they were to receive lethal injections.
But an appeals court overturned the decision on Wednesday and the matter will now go all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Corey Johnson, left, and Dustin Higgs, right, are due to be executed before US President Donald Trump leaves office. Source: Supplied
Martin Luther King III, son of the civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1968, spoke out against the executions this week and said that the federal government should “not be needlessly taking more Black lives”.
"Friday would have been my father's 92nd birthday. Nothing could dishonour his legacy more profoundly than if these executions go forward," he wrote in the Washington Post.
"Over the past year, we have lost too many Black lives to police violence and a pandemic mismanaged by this administration.”
With AFP and Reuters.
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