Just five
days before the end of the presidency, Donald Trump-led US government on Thursday
executed a drug trafficker for his involvement in a series of murders in
Virginia, despite his lawyers’ claim that the execution would cause excruciating suffering, reports AFP.

Corey
Johnson, who was a part of a gang implicated in 10 slayings in 1992 in the US state of
Virginia, was convicted in seven of those cases by a federal court.

The 52-year-old African American pronounced dead at 11:34 pm(Indiana time) after injecting lethal dose at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

In his final statement, Johnson, who was recently detected with COVID-19, addressed the families of the victims and said, “I
would have said I was sorry before, but I didn’t know how. I hope you will find
peace.

Johnson’s execution would be followed by Dustin Higgs, a 48-year-old Black man
convicted of kidnapping and killing three young women on federal land near
Washington in 1996, who is slated to be executed on Friday.

The executions came after an appeals court overturned a judge’s Tuesday ruling to postpone the executions for several weeks as their
lungs were not fully recovered and the injection of phenobarbital may cause
suffering prohibited by the Constitution, which bans “cruel”
punishment.

Earlier, the high
court also rejected an appeal from Johnson’s lawyers that he was intellectually
disabled, and therefore should be spared the death penalty.

Calling the execution a ‘stark violation of the Constitution and federal law’, attorneys Donald Salzman and Ronald Tabak said, “Corey
simply lacked the capacity to operate as the ‘drug kingpin’ the government
falsely portrayed him as for nearly 30 years. He could barely read or
write.”

The lawyers also sought clemency from President Donald Trump who being a staunch advocate of death penalty, ignored all the requests.

Trump
administration however, is on the receiving end of intense backlash ever since the execution for their efforts to proceed with the move while so close to the transfer of
power.