Dustin Higgs

Dustin Higgs

Dustin John Higgs (March 10, 1972 – January 16, 2021) was an American man who was executed by the United States federal government, having been convicted and sentenced to death for his role in the January 1996 murders of three women in Maryland. 19-year-old Tamika Black, 21-year-old Tanji Jackson, and 23-year-old Mishann Chinn were all shot and killed near the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, on the Patuxent Research Refuge, in Prince George's County, Maryland. Because the murders occurred on the Patuxent Research Refuge, which is classed as federal land, Higgs was tried by the federal government rather than by the state of Maryland. His case, conviction, and execution were the subject of multiple controversies.The main controversy surrounding Higgs's case was that Higgs did not personally kill any of the three victims. The man who fatally shot all three women to death, Willis Mark Haynes, was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole plus 45 years, while Higgs, who remained in a vehicle when the killings took place, received a death sentence. The prosecution argued that although Higgs did not kill anyone, he was the ringleader, and not only ordered Haynes to kill the women but bullied him into it. Higgs and his defense team maintained his innocence to the end, arguing that although he was involved, he was merely a witness to the crime, and was set up by Haynes and another witness, Victor Gloria. In 2012 Haynes claimed in a sworn affidavit that Higgs did not force or threaten him to kill any of the victims.Despite the appeals for clemency from his lawyers, Higgs was executed via lethal injection on January 16, 2021, becoming the thirteenth and latest person to be executed during the Trump administration, during which federal executions returned after a seventeen-year hiatus.

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