No Mercy Came for Brandon Bernard and None Will Come Today for Alfred Bourgeois

“I’m sorry,” Brandon Bernard said, kicking off a three-minute apologetic speech that would be his final words. “That’s the only words I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day.”

Bernard was executed at 9:27 p.m. Thursday evening at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Iniana, at the age of 40 for a crime he committed when he was 18. In 1999, Bernard, Christian Vialva (who was 19 at the time) and three teen boys carjacked Todd and Stacie Bagley in Killeen, Texas. They drove around with the couple in the trunk until Vialva shot the two of them in the head. Then Bernard set the car on fire with the bodies inside.

It was a brutal crime for which Bernard has spent the past 20 years showing nothing but remorse and serving as a model prisoner on death row. The man has become nothing at all like the likely brutal gangbanger prosecutors portrayed him as to convince jurors to sentence him to death. Subsequently five jurors have reversed their positions and said they wanted his sentence commuted, as did a former prosecutor working on the case.

Vialva was executed in September. The Supreme Court Thursday night declined to intervene in Bernard’s case. Three of the justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, said they would have granted the application to stay the execution, but they were outvoted. President Donald Trump spent Thursday evening complaining on Twitter about how the presidential election results were fraudulent and insisting that he actually won. He did not grant Bernard’s request for a pardon and did not comment publicly on Bernard’s execution. He has been silent on all nine federal executions that h