SCOTUS clear way for 13th federal execution in six months, prompting extended dissents from Justices Breyer and Sotomayor

The now familiar federal execution drama has now played out one more time, this time around with Dustin Higgs securing a stay in lower courts only to see the Supreme Court allowing the execution to go forward.  Notably, with this last scheduled federal execution, Justice Beyer and Justice Sotomayor each sought to say their piece in extended dissents.  Justice Breyer's fourt-page dissent starts this way:

Last July the Federal Government executed Daniel Lee. Lee’s execution was the first federal execution in seventeen years.  The Government’s execution of Dustin Higgs tonight will be its thirteenth in six months.  I wrote in July that “the resumption of federal executions promises to provide examples that illustrate the difficulties of administering the death penalty consistent with the Constitution.”  Barr v. Lee, 591 U.S. ___, ___ (2020) (dissenting opinion) (slip op., at 2).  The cases that have come before us provide several of those examples.

And Justice Sotomayor's ten-page dissent starts and ends this way:

After seventeen years without a single federal execution, the Government has executed twelve people since July.  They are Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, Dustin Honken, Lezmond Mitchell, Keith Nelson, William LeCroy Jr., Christopher Vialva, Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Montgomery, and, just last night, Corey Johnson.  Today, Dustin Higgs will become the thirteenth.  To put that in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades.

This unprecedented rush of federal executions has predictably given rise to many difficult legal disputes....

There is no matter as “grave as the determination of whether a human life should be taken or spared.”  Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, 189 (1976) (opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.).  That decision is not something to be rushed or taken lightly; there can be no “justice on the fly” in matters of life and death.  See Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 427 (2009).  Yet the Court has allowed the United States to execute thirteen people in six months under a statutory scheme and regulatory protocol that have received inadequate scrutiny, without resolving the serious claims the condemned individuals raised.  Those whom the Government executed during this endeavor deserved more from this Court.  I respectfully dissent.

This AP article reports on the execution, and includes these passages:

Higgs, 48, was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. Asked if he had any last words, Higgs was calm but defiant, naming each of the women prosecutors said he ordered killed. “I’d like to say I am an innocent man. ... I am not responsible for the deaths,” he said softly. “I did not order the murders.”

He did not apologize for anything he did on the night 25 years ago when the women were shot by another man, who received a life sentence.