Gloria received the additional undisclosed benefit of having an unrelated state murder investigation against him dropped at the urging of federal officers to protect his credibility as the star witness. “Moreover,” they wrote, “significant questions remain as to whether Mr. In their clemency petition, Higgs’ lawyers said Gloria received a “substantial deal” in exchange for his cooperation The appeals court concluded that rational jurors could find that Higgs had the dominant role in the murders even though Haynes indisputably was the triggerman. Higgs has argued that his death sentence should be thrown out because jurors failed to consider it as a “mitigating factor” that Haynes was convicted of identical charges but sentenced to life in prison. Gloria pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to the murders and was sentenced to seven years in prison. A different jury convicted Higgs and returned a death sentence after a separate trial.
The jurors who convicted Haynes failed to reach a unanimous verdict on whether to impose a death sentence. It contained Higgs’s nickname, “Bones,” his telephone number, his address number and the tag number for his van. Investigators found Jackson’s day planner at the scene of the killings. “Gloria turned to ask Higgs what he was doing, but saw Higgs holding the steering wheel and watching the shootings from the rearview mirror,” said the 2013 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Higgs handed his pistol to Haynes, who shot all three women outside the van before the men left, Gloria testified.
“Aware at that point that something was amiss, one of the women asked if they were going to have to ‘walk from here’ and Higgs responded ‘something like that,’” said an appeals court ruling upholding Higgs’s death sentence.
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