This week, the federal government plans to execute three people: Lisa Montgomery, Cory Johnson and Dustin Higgs. If all three executions are carried out, that will make 13 people executed by the Trump administration since July — all against the backdrop of a raging pandemic that has infected even the people facing execution and their attorneys and, now, the recent mob violence that killed five people at the Capitol.
If there has ever been a time for our nation to see that more killing is not the path to justice, this is it.
Lisa Montgomery suffered childhood abuse so severe and unimaginable that she developed psychosis. Cory Johnson is intellectually disabled. Dustin Higgs received death for murders that he did not carry out, while the person who pulled the trigger received a lesser sentence.
The stories of these individuals sound familiar because they are much like the stories of people on death row in North Carolina. The people our government seeks to execute are, almost always, people who live on society’s margins. People scarred by poverty, violence, and childhood trauma.
Their death sentences are not the result of a careful process, but arbitrary and disproportionate — depending more on the quality of their lawyers or the place where they were prosecuted than on the facts of their crimes.
They are also, very clearly, tainted by the same racism that recently paraded itself through the halls of the nation’s Capitol. White people make up more than three-quarters of the U.S. population, yet less than half of those sentenced to die, both at the federal level and in North Carolina. If these three executions are carried out, the current administration will have executed 13 people, eight of whom — 60 percent — are people of color.
Joe Biden has promised to end the federal death penalty. And before 2020, no president had carried out an execution since 2003. People can make their own assumptions about what’s behind this administration’s frenzied killing spree in its waning days.
But it’s clear that our nation faces many dangers right now, and these three people are not among them. Their deaths will bring no healing, only more cruelty and heartbreak.
