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The United States has killed the tenth federal sentenced to death this Friday since Donald Trump decided in July to re-apply the death penalty for crimes under federal jurisdiction (that is, that cross the borders of each one). one of the states).
The death of 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois in an Indiana federal prison occurred at 8:21 p.m. Friday and illustrates Donald Trump’s policy of speeding up federal executions, as it is the second of two. consecutive days. On Thursday, in the same prison, Brandon Bernard, 40, had been murdered.
The Trump administration is accelerating executions with the death penalty in the US.
The executions of Bourgeois and Bernard were the first to occur during the presidential transition period since President Grover Cleveland’s tenure in the 19th century.
It was also the first time in more than 130 years of history that the number of federal executions in a single year reached double digits. The last time this happened was in 1896, also under the leadership of Grover Cleveland. That year, the United States killed 14 people on death row.
Alfred Bourgeois was sentenced to death in 2004 for the murder of his own daughter. As the Associated Press explains, Bourgeois lived in Louisiana with his wife and two children. After the separation, the man obtained custody of his daughter and, according to the court case, tortured his daughter several times, sexually abused her and ended up killing the minor during a truck trip in Texas. The fact that the crimes occurred in several states made the jurisdiction go to federal justice.
Bourgeois’s lawyers argue that the convict had cognitive disabilities and emphasized that it was “shameful” to kill him “regardless of his intellectual disability,” especially after several years of good behavior in jail. The defendant’s legal representatives sought to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, but the court rejected the request.
The case of Brandon Bernard, killed Thursday, had drawn the attention of several public figures, who called for the suspension of the death penalty. The famous lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, who had defended Trump in the process of the impeachment process, joined the cause and also sought to stay the execution, but the White House did not comply with the request.
Bernard was murdered by the United States after being convicted of the death of a couple in Iowa in 1999. He and other young gang members had kidnapped the couple in the state of Texas. At the time of the crime, Bernard was 18 years old.
Donald Trump does not expect to abide by the tradition of suspending the execution of capital sentences during the presidential transition period: Three more deaths of US citizens convicted of serious crimes are expected before January 20, when Joe Biden takes office. The future president of the United States has already said that he intends to end the death penalty at the federal level and work to do the same in individual states.
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