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A rush of federal executions during the transition — of mostly Black men — unparalleled by any president in 131 years
While much of the country was swept up in the horrors of the escalating coronavirus pandemic, or focused on the unprecedented assault on the election by Donald Trump and his GOP enablers, the U.S. government has been carrying out more executions than at any time since the federal death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1988.
Last night 40-year old Brandon Bernard was executed after the Supreme Court refused to halt his death by lethal injection. He’d been convicted of being an accomplice to a crime in Texas at age 18. The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonja Sotomayor writing in her opinion:
Today, the Court allows the Federal Government to execute Brandon Bernard, despite Bernard’s troubling allegations that the Government secured his death sentence by withholding exculpatory evidence and knowingly eliciting false testimony against him.
Jessica Schulberg at HuffPost covered the story and the aftermath:
Bernard, who is Black, was sentenced to death by a nearly all-white jury in 2000 for his role in a botched car-jacking that ended in the killing of married couple Todd and Stacie Bagley. Bernard was not present when his friends abducted the Bagleys and he was not the one to shoot them dead. Christopher Vialva, the man who shot the Bagleys in the head, was executed in September. Prosecutors claimed Bernard was the one who set the car on fire with the Bagleys inside, although the government’s cooperating witness admitted at trial that he didn’t actually see who lit fire to the car.
At 18 years old, Bernard was just barely legally eligible for the death penalty. The teens who participated in the crime and were under 18 received more lenient sentences, even those who were more culpable than Bernard in the Bagleys’ deaths. Two have completed their 20-year sentences; a third is serving a 35-year sentence.
In 2018 Bernard’s lawyers found evidence that was covered up by government prosecutors and would have helped his case, as Justice Sotomayor noted. A majority of the jurors who sentenced him have now said it would have changed their minds. But Bernard was turned away by courts from presenting that evidence before being put to death.
The Justice Department, with Trump’s urging, had scheduled 13 executions beginning in July, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Since the federal death penalty’s reinstatement in 1988, there had only been three federal executions, all under George W. Bush’s administration — one of them Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. There had been no federal executions since 2003.
Bernard is one of five men — four of them Black — to be scheduled to be executed by the federal government since Trump lost the election. With the scheduled execution of Alfred Bourgeois today, Trump will have executed more people in a year than any president in 131 years. No president in more than a century has carried out executions after losing an election and during the lame duck period, traditionally a time when most major actions are put off until the next administration.
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Image: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead via Flickr