As the end of the Trump presidency approaches, federal executions are accelerating. If tradition dictates that the government refrains from applying the death penalty during the passing of the torch between the outgoing president and his successor, Donald Trump is once again an exception. Four executions are scheduled before January 20 by the Ministry of Justice, a first since 1889.
After a close break Seventeen-year-old Trump administration in July 2019 relaunched the application of the death penalty for federal crimes: terrorism, civil rights abuses, attacks on federal agents and property, murder of children. Between 1976 and 2003, there were only three federal executions. Since July 14, 2020, there have been nine. To make up for a possible shortage of pentobarbital, the Ministry of Justice has authorized the use of alternative methods: gas chamber, firing squad.
Appeal and leniency dismissed
On Thursday, December 10, at 9:27 p.m., Brandon Bernard, 40, was administered the lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute (Indiana), which houses death row for male convicts. The Supreme Court rejected his last appeal, against the advice of the three liberal judges. The president refused to pardon him.
Brandon Bernard was incarcerated for the assassination of a couple of pastors from Iowa, Todd and Stacie Bagley, kidnapped in Texas in 1999 by a group of young delinquents. Brandon Bernard, just 18 at the time, did not pull the trigger but admitted to having started the fire in the vehicle in which the pastor’s wife died of asphyxiation. Group frontman Christopher Vialva, 19, was executed on September 24.
Brandon Bernard was executed despite numerous appeals for clemency – including that of five of the jurors who convicted him in 2000; the one, addressed directly to Trump, by Kim Kardashian, and that of some 500,000 other Americans. The abolitionists had made it the symbol of the arbitrariness of capital punishment. Victim not only of obstinacy – the “ final cruelty ยป, Wrote the New Yorker – a president at the end of his term of office. But also legislation that has evolved. Today, the culprit would no longer be sentenced to death: since 2005, the Supreme Court has prohibited the use of the death penalty for those under 18.
The execution of Brandon Bernard was the ninth since July 14, date of the effective return of the federal death penalty, after a year of challenges, concluded by the decision of the Supreme Court to validate the process. Barring clemency, 13 people – 12 men and one woman – will have been executed before the end of Mr. Trump’s mandate, who will have approved the execution of nearly a quarter of the 61 convicts waiting on death row . This, while his elected successor, Joe Biden, opposes the death penalty and plans to suspend federal executions again.
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