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Alfred Bourgeois, a black man sentenced to death for the murder of his two-year-old daughter, was executed by lethal injection in a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Image by HeungSoon from Pixabay.
WASHINGTON – US authorities carried out their 10th execution of the year on Friday, the latest in a series of capital punishment the administration of President Donald Trump carried out before he left office.
Alfred Bourgeois, a black man sentenced to death for the murder of his two-year-old daughter, was executed by lethal injection in a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
“Bourgeois was pronounced dead at 8:21 pm EST by the Vigo County Coroner,” the federal prison said in a statement.
The execution came a day after another convicted inmate, Brandon Bernard, was also executed in Terre Haute.
After a paternity test, Bourgeois, a 55-year-old former truck driver, took temporary custody of his daughter and drove her on a truck route for part of the summer of 2002.
He severely abused her and eventually smashed her skull with the windshield.
Since the crime took place at a military base where he was delivering, he was tried in federal court and sentenced to death in 2004.
He remained on death row, and the United States suspended federal executions starting in 2003, in particular due to doubts about the legality of injecting drugs.
However, Trump restarted federal executions in July, even though states that still use capital punishment have delayed theirs due to the dangers posed to prison staff and witnesses by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Seven federal executions occurred before the Nov.3 election that Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden, who will be sworn in on Jan.20 despite the outgoing president’s refusal to concede.
Biden has vowed to work with Congress to end federal executions.
For 131 years, outgoing presidents traditionally suspended federal executions during the transition period.
But the Trump administration had announced six executions between November and January, including Bourgeois.
His attorneys had asked the United States Supreme Court to intervene, saying he suffered from a mental disability.
“The jury that sentenced Mr. Bourgeois to death never knew that he was a person with an intellectual disability because his trial lawyers did not present the evidence available to them,” said his new lawyer, Victor Abreu.
After the execution, his legal team issued a statement saying that “tonight, the United States killed a man with an intellectual disability despite clear directives from the United States Supreme Court and federal laws prohibiting it.” .
Bourgeois was the 17th person to be executed in the United States in 2020, a record low linked to suspensions at the state level.
It was the 10th executed at the federal level, the highest in more than a century.
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