It was rumored that the executioners-private contractors from out of town, who were paid in cash-were staying at the hotel, too. Activists wandered through, on their way to the picket across the street from the prison, about a five-minute drive south. Higgs’s spiritual adviser, Yusuf Nur, the only person who could accompany Higgs into the death chamber, sat nearby, not far from Alexa, who was being interviewed by a reporter.

On the lobby level of the Terre Haute Marriott, on Friday morning, Shawn Nolan, Higgs’s lead attorney, could be seen using the printer and scanner of the hotel’s business center to handle the day’s appeals. “I don’t care if it’s a stay or a reprieve, whatever. 1 “Just give me six days,” she told a reporter on Thursday, January 14. His sister Alexa Cave-Wingate had asked her whole church to pray. The man scheduled to die last was Dustin John Higgs, a forty-eight-year-old black man, whom the role seemed to fit no more than any other person on death row. A few days before I traveled to Terre Haute, Representative Ayanna Pressley and Senator Dick Durbin announced a joint bill to end the penalty, endorsed then by more than seventy others in Congress. In late 2019, polling showed for the first time that a majority of Americans supported life in prison over death sentences. Twenty-two states already prohibited the penalty, and twelve others hadn’t carried out an execution in more than a decade. The realities of the penalty’s application over the intervening twenty years, he would soon note in his confirmation hearing, had given him “great pause.” His selected attorney general, Merrick Garland, had been the lead official in the Department of Justice who pursued and secured the death sentence for McVeigh, but he too had turned with the times. Though he’d supported the penalty in his tough-on-crime years and as late as the Aughts, as a candidate in 2020 he’d promised to end capital punishment at the federal level and to push states to follow suit. In five days, Joe Biden would take office and the death chamber would be stilled again: no executions could take place without his approval and he had made his position clear. I arrived in Terre Haute on January 15, the day of the last scheduled killing, and what would possibly be the final federal execution of the modern era. And the undertaking was even more nasty and hurried than the numbers convey, the executions rammed forward at each closed door by an administration that would forever be known for such force. It was the most in a year since 1896-including an unprecedented five lame-duck killings-and more than all the states combined in the same year, a feat never before achieved. In July 2020, the Trump Administration resumed federal executions, and in its final seven months killed thirteen people, more than had ever been put to death by the federal government in so brief a period. Following him, the chamber was used twice more under the George W. Bush Administration, and then left idle for almost two decades.

McVeigh’s was the first federal execution in thirty-eight years. The anesthetic effect of the first is understood to be short-lived the last, it has been claimed in court, feels as though one is “being burned alive from the inside.” The death chamber there was first used in 2001, in the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who was killed by what is now considered the traditional lethal-injection cocktail of three drugs: sodium thiopental, an anesthetic pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant that effects asphyxiation and potassium chloride, a salt that causes cardiac arrest. Terre Haute was selected as the site for federal killings in 1993-amid a rise in capital sentencing following a twenty-year lull-because of its central location in the country. The prison complex-south of downtown via Route 150, past the dome and bell tower of the Vigo County courthouse, and after the Tire Barn on Spring Hill Road-comprises the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution and the maximum-security U.S. Penitentiary, the home of the Special Confinement Unit: death row and the death house, a low, windowless building of dark-red brick on the northern edge of the grounds. The surrounding country is in fact flat and wide, precipitously exposed to the sky. The sole federal execution chamber in the United States is in a place called Terre Haute-the high ground-in far western Indiana, named for a swath of land that rises above the nearby Wabash River.

Dustin higgs innocent