Brandon Bernard death penalty: US carries out execution during presidential transition despite pleas from Kim Kardashian

The Trump administration carried out its ninth federal execution of the year and the first during a seedy presidential term in 130 years on Thursday, sentencing a Texas street gang member to death for his role in the murders of a couple. Iowa religious than two decades ago.

Four more federal executions are planned, including one on Friday (US time), in the weeks leading up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The case of Brandon Bernard, who received a lethal injection of phenobarbital inside a death chamber at 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.

Minutes after the execution, the frustrated reality star posted on Twitter: “I’m so broke right now. Brandon was killed. He was such a reformed person.”

“This just has to change – our system is so screwed up,” Kardashian said in closing.

With witnesses watching from behind a glass barrier, Bernard, 40, was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. ET.

Bernard addressed his last words to the family of the couple he killed, speaking with surprising calm for someone he knew 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.”

As he spoke before he died, Bernard showed no outward signs of fear, anguish or apprehension, speaking lucidly and naturally as witnesses watched behind a glass barrier.

Speaking for more than three minutes, Bernard said that he had been waiting for this opportunity to say that he was sorry, not only to the family of the victims, but also for the pain he caused his own family.

Earlier, he said of his role in the murder: “I wish I could take it all away, but I can’t.”

Bernard was 18 when he and four other teenagers kidnapped and robbed Todd and Stacie Bagley as they were leaving a Sunday service in Killeen, Texas.

Trump resumed federal executions in July after a 17-year hiatus despite the coronavirus outbreak in US prisons.

Todd Bagley’s mother, Georgia, spoke to reporters within 30 minutes of the execution and said she wanted to thank Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and others at the Justice Department for bringing the family to closure.

He was moved when he spoke about the apologies of Bernard before dying and an accomplice, Christopher Vialva, who was executed in September.

“The apology and the remorse … did a lot to heal my heart,” she said, starting to cry and then compose herself. “I can say a lot: I forgive you.”

Alfred Bourgeois, a 56-year-old truck driver from Louisiana, will die Friday for killing his 2-year-old daughter by repeatedly banging his head against the windows and dash of a truck.

Bourgeois’s lawyers alleged that he had an intellectual disability and was therefore not eligible for the death penalty, but several courts said 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. “

Just before the execution was scheduled, Bernard’s attorneys filed documents with the Supreme Court to stop the execution, but the higher court denied the request, clearing the way for the execution to proceed.

Bernard had been crocheting in prison and even launched a death row crochet group in which inmates have shared patterns to make sweaters, blankets and hats, said Ashley Kincaid Eve, an anti-death penalty activist.

Federal executions during a presidential transfer of power are also rare, especially during a transition from a proponent of the death penalty to an elected president like Biden opposed to capital punishment.

Executions were last carried out in an unsuccessful period during Grover Cleveland’s presidency in the 1890s. Defense attorneys have argued in court and in a Trump clemency petition that Bernard was a subordinate member of low rank of the group.

They say both Bagleys were likely killed before Bernard doused their car with lighter fluid and set it on fire, a claim that conflicts with government testimony at trial. Bernard, they say, had repeatedly expressed his remorse.

The case prompted calls for Trump to intervene, including from a prosecutor in his 2000 trial who now says that racial bias may have played a role in the imposition of a death sentence by the almost all-white jury against Bernard, who is black.

Since then, several jurors have also said publicly that they regret not opting for life in prison.

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.

One of Bernard’s co-defendants, Vialva, was executed in September. Prosecutors said Vialva, the oldest of the teens at 19, was the ringleader who shot the Bagleys as they lay in the trunk before Bernard set the car on fire.

The teens approached the Bagleys on the afternoon of June 21, 1999, and asked them to take them after they stopped at a convenience store, planning all along to rob the couple.

After the Bagleys agreed, Vialva pulled out a gun and put them in the trunk.

The Bagleys, both in their 20s, spoke through an opening in the back seat and urged their abductors to accept Jesus as they drove for hours trying to use the Bagley’s ATM cards.

After the teens pulled to the side of the road, Vialva walked backwards and shot the Bagleys in the head.

The central question in the decision to sentence Bernard to death was whether Vialva’s shooting or Bernard’s fire killed the Bagleys.

Evidence from the trial showed Todd Bagley likely died instantly. But a government expert said Stacie Bagley had soot in her airways, indicating that the smoke inhalation and not the gunshot killed her.

Defense attorneys have said the claim was unproven. They have also said that Bernard believed both Bagleys were dead and that he feared the consequences of refusing the order from the senior Vialva to burn the car to destroy the evidence.

The first series of federal executions during the summer were of white men, which critics said seemed calculated to make them less controversial amid summer protests of racial profiling.

Four of the five prisoners who are to die before Biden’s inauguration on January 20 are black men.

The fifth is a white woman who would be the first inmate executed by the federal government in nearly six decades.