Federal prisoner Brandon Bernard was hanged at 9:27 p.m. Thursday night by lawyers, celebrities, prosecutors who threw him in jail, and at least one Trumpworld luminary to persuade the president to save his life.
According to the Associated Press, Bernard spoke his final words to the families of his victims: “I’m sorry. These are the only words I can say that capture how I feel now and how I feel that day. “
In a statement released after Bernard’s death, the families of both victims thanked Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr and the Justice Department for moving forward with the execution.
Georgia Bugle wrote, “Without this process my family and I would not have had to stop moving forward in life. She said Journalists At the scene, “I can say a lot: I forgive them.”
The 40-year-old was sentenced to death by lethal injection at a federal facility in Indiana under the supervision of President Donald Trump but it was partly not significant because of how he was beaten against the peers he cared for during his tenure at All Fees.
During this year’s impeachment hearing, both attorneys for Trump’s legal defense, attorneys Lan Lan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, joined Bernard’s legal team in the past few days, and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution. Socialist entrepreneur Kim Kardashian, who worked with Trump on issues of clarity, was the most outspoken speaker arguing for liberation. Hours before Bernard was executed, the court refused to stay the death sentence.
“Tonight, we love Brandon Bernard – and we are many – filled with justified anger and deep sadness at the federal government’s actions in taking his life. Brandn’s life is important, “Bernard’s attorney Robert Owens told the Daily Beast.
Trump was not only persuaded by those petitions to show the limitations of the previous relationship, but also to show the president’s determination to execute a number of federal prisoners before his term ends in January.
This past summer, the Supreme Court allowed the Justice Department to resume federal executions after a 17-year hiatus. In the months that followed, Attorney General William Barr and the DOJ press office announced Bernard’s impending execution, describing it as a “particularly heinous” crime and “prisoner’s involvement in a brutal murder.”[ing] Youth and Stacey Bagli, two youth ministers on military reservations in 1999. ”
Bernard, who was 18 at the time and was kidnapped by four teenage friends with the intention of robbing him, but one of the teenagers, Christopher Vialva, was shot in the head instead. Bernard then set the couple’s car on fire. A medical examiner testified that Stacey Bugle was still alive after the bullet but died from smoking, which led Bernard’s colleagues to dispute. (Wilwa was pronounced dead earlier this year.)
“Brand made a terrible mistake at the age of 18,” Owens said. “He tried to show the rest of his life, as he says, that he’s not that person.”
As Bernard’s execution date approached, his allies stepped up a public and behind-the-scenes campaign to appeal to Trump, as well as the White House adviser’s office and other top officials, to intervene. While it was unclear for a moment if Trump would have been aware of the case by the day of scheduled execution, informed sources said they would be familiar with Bernard’s situation with multiple conversations on the details of the case and the murder.
Within hours of the planned execution, many inside and outside the broader Trump orbit sympathizing with Bernard told the Daily Beast that it looked like the president had reached his final decision, and it would not be his choice.
In the end, Trump pushed for clarification. According to two people familiar with the situation, Trump was particularly horrified by the description of the robbery and brutal murder of two young ministers, and by then he had “not changed his mind,” said one person.
As enforcement continued, President Trump was tweeting about “fake news media, FBI and DOJ” and the Biden family and falsely claiming that he had won the 2020 election which he had clearly lost.
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The President’s decision to rescind the call for clarification fits into the broader world view on the moral merits of the death penalty. Many criminal-justice reform advocates have described the pressure to execute the federal execution before promising to stop President-elect Joe Biden as Bar and Trump’s final “assassination spree.”
His appetite is deeper than his desire to earn the guilt of some of the key figures in and around his orbit.
Among the senior employees of the West Wing who have been reporting the case in recent days and the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump on the requests of lawyers, although it is unclear to what extent he discussed with the President, if at all, sources said.
Bernard’s comrades, one of them Kardashian, argues that the prisoner is a reformed man, with a 20-year non-crisis record in prison, who tried to advise young people and troubled people not to go down the same path he did as a teenager.
“The tragedy is that they are hanging a very different man than the young man who committed these crimes 22 years ago.”
– Alan Dershowitz
“The tragedy is that they are hanging a very different man than the young man who committed these crimes 22 years ago,” Darshovitt said in a brief interview Thursday afternoon.
Five of the nine jurors who survived Bernard’s trial came forward to say they did not consider the sentence appropriate for the crime. And former federal lawyer Angela Moore, who defended Bernard’s death sentence on appeal, offered an option last month entitled, “I helped put Brandon Bernard on the federal death penalty.” Now I think he should live. “Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.
His family also demanded clarification, saying that life imprisonment would be better than death.
“I have never been able to hug my dad, but mentally and emotionally he is there for me as much as possible,” his daughter Tanah Scott said in a statement. “It may not sound like most relationships, but it’s the best of me and it’s important to me.”
U.S. District Court Judge James Sweeney rejected the request to stay the execution, ruling that the evidence presented to the jurors, indicating that Jung was not a descendant, was not compelling enough to challenge the jurors’ sentence.
“The sentence in this sentence represents the actual behavior in this case, rather than considering the hierarchy in general,” Sweeney wrote.
After Vialva was hanged in September, Todd Bugle’s mother, Georgia, issued a statement saying, “I believe that when someone intentionally takes another’s life, they suffer the consequences of their actions.”
Moore, a lawyer before the execution on Thursday night, told the Daily Beast: “I want to say that the system has failed Brandon. I failed. The rule of law and the judiciary have failed. Our government is killing legally in return for murder. “
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