The pleas did not serve: Brandon Bernard was executed in the USA – USA and Canada – International

The United States Government executed Brandon Bernard on Thursday, the second man sentenced to death for his involvement in the 1999 murder of a religious married couple in Texas.

Bernard, a 40-year-old African-American man, was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. (local time) after receiving a lethal injection in the Terre Haute (Indiana) jail, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP, in English). ).

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Bernard’s execution received much media attention after television celebrity Kim Kardashian, who has been noted for her interest in the criminal justice system, advocated for outgoing President Donald Trump to commute his sentence.

“Although Brandon participated in this crime, his role was minor compared to that of the other teenagers involved, two of whom have already been released from prison and are at home,” Kardashian noted in one of his multiple tweets.

Bernard was implicated, along with several friends, in the June 1999 murder of Todd and Stacie Bagley, a preachers’ marriage from Iowa who had traveled to Texas for a religious event.

Bernard’s group, led by Christopher Vialva, took advantage of the fact that the Bagleys had stopped to use a phone booth to ask them to hitchhike.

Once inside the vehicle, the young men reduced the Bagleys and locked them in the trunk as they scoured ATMs trying to extract money from their credit cards and to pawn Stacie’s wedding ring.

According to documents from the Department of Justice, being locked in the trunk, “the couple spoke with their kidnappers about God and begged for their lives.”

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But at one point the young people decided to end their lives: it was Christopher Vialva who opened the trunk and shot them, and then they set the vehicle on fire. According to the indictment, Stacie Bagley was still alive when the vehicle was set ablaze.

Since the murders occurred within the domains of the Fort Hood military base in Texas, it was the federal justice system that took on the cases of Bernard and his accomplices.

In addition to Bernard, Vialva was sentenced to death (executed on September 24), while four other men who were minors at the time of the events reached agreements with prosecutors.

In the days leading up to his execution, five of the nine jurors who sentenced him to death and the prosecutor in charge of the case, Angela Moore, also advocated commuting Bernard’s death sentence in exchange for a chain sentence. life.

His attorney, Robert C. Owen, said in a statement Thursday that “Brandon made a terrible mistake when he was 18. But he did not kill anyone, and he never stopped feeling shame and deep remorse for his criminal acts that claimed lives. by Todd and Stacie Bagley “.

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Bernard’s was the ninth execution ordered by the Donald Trump administration during the second half of the year, the first in nearly two decades within the federal system and an unprecedented streak since the reintroduction of the death penalty four decades ago.

In addition, it was the sixteenth execution of the year in the United States, nine federal and seven state. Since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, 1,528 prisoners have been executed in the country, although only twelve of them at the hands of the federal government.

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US Attorney General William Barr has scheduled four more executions before Democrat Joe Biden, who advocates for the abolition of the death penalty, takes office on January 20.

The next of the four executions is scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, while the other three for the week of January 11, Trump’s last in the White House.

EFE