US federal authorities were planning two more executions before Donald Trump's departure from the White House, including one Thursday of a former drug trafficker sentenced to death for a series of murders.
Corey Johnson was part of a gang implicated in 10 murders in 1992 in the US state of Virginia. He was convicted in federal court for his involvement in seven of them.
The 52-year-old is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Thursday night at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, unless the Supreme Court grants him a last-minute stay.
The next day, authorities plan to execute Dustin Higgs, a 48-year-old Black man convicted of kidnapping and killing three young women on federal land near Washington in 1996.
Both men contracted Covid-19 in December and a judge decided Tuesday to postpone their executions for several weeks.
Their lungs have not fully recovered and the injection of pentobarbital may cause them suffering prohibited by the Constitution, which bans "cruel" punishment, the court said.
But an appeals court overturned the decision on Wednesday and the matter will now go all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Lawyers for Johnson, whose first name was spelt Cory by the US Department of Justice, argue that he is not mentally competent to face execution.
However, the Supreme Court has been reshaped by Trump and now has six conservative justices out of nine, who for months have systematically given the green light to the Republican administration in capital punishment cases.
The outgoing president, a strong proponent of the death penalty, has ignored all requests for clemency from convicts.
It has since carried them out at an unprecedented rate. Eleven Americans have received lethal injections in Terre Haute since the summer.
That includes, for the first time in nearly 70 years, a woman -- Lisa Montgomery, executed Tuesday despite doubts about her mental health.
President-elect Joe Biden, who will be sworn in on Wednesday, is opposed to the death penalty and has promised to work with Congress to try to abolish it federally.
Democratic congressmen introduced a bill to that effect on Monday. Their party has regained control of the Senate and the bill could be adopted.
Trump administration efforts to proceed with executions so close to the transfer of power has prompted outrage from rights defenders.
"Friday would have been my father's 92nd birthday. Nothing could dishonour his legacy more profoundly than if these executions go forward," Martin Luther King III, son of the civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1968, wrote in the Washington Post.
"Over the past year, we have lost too many Black lives to police violence and a pandemic mismanaged by this administration. The federal government should not be needlessly taking more Black lives," he wrote.
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