Dustin Higgs maintained his innocence in the murder of three women on a failed date to the very end.
In his final words before execution, the prisoner who had spent three decades on death row sounded calm and defiant, according to a reporter who served as a media witness.
"I'd like to say I am an innocent man," Higgs said, mentioning the three victims - Tamika Black, 19,Tanji Jackson, 21, and Mishann Chinn, 23 - by name.
"I did not order the murders."
He became the 13th and final death row prisoner to be killed in President Donald Trump's administration's extraordinary execution spree before he leaves office.
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Higgs was present when the three women were shot to death after a failed date on a wildlife reserve in Maryland in 1996.
However he did not personally shoot or kill any of the three women - the man who did was sentenced to life in prison.
That feature of Higgs' death penalty case was among a string of concerns which had long attracted controversy and pleas for clemency.
The key argument against his execution focused on that it was another man - Willis Mark Haynes - who had shot and killed the trio at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center nearly 30 years ago.
Higgs was convicted for his role in the kidnap in murder - the prosecution claiming he oversaw and egged on the killings.
After a failed triple date with the three women, Higgs and accomplice, Haynes, had offered to drive them home but instead took them to the wildlife reserve.
Prosecutors said Higgs gave Haynes a gun and told him to shoot the three women.
Haynes, who confessed to being the shooter, was sentenced to life in prison while Higgs was sentenced to death in a separate trial, a disparity that his lawyers say was grounds for clemency.
Higgs, 48, always denied the accusation he was a ringleader, saying he had been set up and was merely a witness to the crime.
His lawyer criticised the decision to proceed with the federal execution -the 13th and final under outgoing Trump's administration - claiming an innocent man's life had been taken.
There had been a bid to halt the proceedings, delaying the execution by five hours.
However the US Supreme Court's conservative majority cleared the way for lethal injections to proceed, overturning the stay ordered by a federal appeals court.
He was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. EST (6.23am GMT), the Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement.
The Department of Justice executed him with lethal injections of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, at its death chamber in its prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
"The government completed its unprecedented slaughter of 13 human beings tonight by killing Dustin Higgs, a Black man who never killed anyone, on Martin Luther King's birthday," Shawn Nolan, one of Higgs' lawyers, said in a statement following the execution.
"Dustin spent decades on death row in solitary confinement helping others around him, while working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions."
The Supreme Court's ruling was consistent with its earlier decisions: it had dismissed all orders by lower courts delaying federal executions since they were resumed last year.
"This is not justice," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent.
"After waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully.
"When it did not, this Court should have. It has not."
Higgs and another death row inmate, Corey Johnson, had been diagnosed with Covid-19 in December.
But on Wednesday the Supreme Court rejected an order by a federal judge in Washington delaying their executions for several weeks to allow their lungs to heal.
The Justice Department executed Johnson on Thursday night.
Higgs became the 13th person executed by the US government in the string of executions begun last summer by Trump, after a 17-year hiatus at the federal level.
Only three people since 1963 had been executed by the federal government before
Trump's time in power.
