Shawn Nolan, a federal public defender who represents Higgs, said the pandemic has made it harder to safely meet with clients and work on legal challenges to spare their lives. One employee assigned to the unit tested positive for COVID, a spokesman said in an email, but he said that employee had no contact with staff involved in executions in November or December. The federal agency, citing pending litigation and privacy concerns, declined to say how many inmates in the Special Confinement Unit, the formal name for death row, have tested positive. Earlier in the week, for example, the website said 248 inmates had active cases. That number can fluctuate greatly as some recover and others test positive. Penitentiary in Terre Haute as of Saturday. Bureau of Prison’s website listed 107 inmates and five staff members with “confirmed active cases” of COVID at the U.S. As with other correctional facilities across the country, the Terre Haute prison complex has had outbreaks as well. The pandemic has already delayed executions on the state level, with officials wary of gathering, in a confined space, the large number of personnel, witnesses and others needed to carry them out.īut federal authorities have taking the opposite tack, conducting executions at an unprecedented pace even as critics say these have become superspreader events.ĭefense attorneys say multiple people involved in executions have contracted COVID. They argue that would violate his constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. COVID, his lawyers argue, has caused lung damage that puts him at greater risk of painful pulmonary edema, the flooding of fluid into the lungs, when he is given the lethal injection. Higgs tested positive for COVID-19 last month, a diagnosis that figures in a case, currently awaiting a ruling, seeking to delay his execution.
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