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The Trump administration carried out the first execution during a presidential term in 130 years on Thursday, sentencing a Texas street gang member to death for his role in the killings of an Iowa religious couple more than two decades ago.
It marks the ninth federal execution of the year, with four more federal executions, including one on Friday, planned for the weeks leading up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The case of Brendan Bernard, who received a lethal injection of phenobarbital inside a death chamber in a US prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, was a rare execution of a person who was in his late teens when his crime was committed.
Several high-profile figures, including reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, had asked President Donald Trump to commute Bernard’s sentence to life in prison.
Bernard, 40, addressed his last words to the family of the couple he killed, speaking with surprising calm for someone who knew he was about to die.
“I’m sorry,” he said, raising his head and looking at the windows of the witness room.
“Those are the only words I can say that fully capture how I feel now and how I felt that day.”
Bernard was 18 when he and four other teenagers kidnapped and robbed Todd and Stacie Bagley while on their way to a Sunday service in Killeen, Texas.
Trump resumed federal executions in July after a 17-year hiatus despite coronavirus outbreaks in US prisons.
Alfred Bourgeois, a 56-year-old truck driver from Louisiana, will die Friday for killing his two-year-old daughter by repeatedly banging his head against the windows and dash of a truck.
Lawyers for Mr. Bourgeois alleged that he had an intellectual disability and therefore could not be sentenced to death, but several courts said that the evidence did not support that claim.
Before Bernard’s execution, Kardashian West tweeted that she had spoken to him before: “The hardest call I’ve ever had. Brandon, selfless as ever, focused on his family and made sure they were okay. He told me not to cry because our fight is not over. “
And just before the execution was scheduled, Bernard’s lawyers filed documents with the Supreme Court to stop the execution.
But approximately two and a half hours after the scheduled execution date, the Supreme Court denied the request, clearing the way for the execution to proceed.
Federal executions during a presidential transfer of power are rare, especially during a transition from a proponent of the death penalty to a president-elect opposed to capital punishment like Joe Biden.
The last time executions occurred in an unsuccessful period was during Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the 1890s.
The Justice Department refused to delay Thursday’s execution of Bernard, another inmate on Friday and three more in January, even after eight officials who participated in an execution last month tested positive for the coronavirus.
The eight federal executions in 2020 are already more than in the previous 56 years combined.
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