Brandon Bernard: US government carries out first ‘lame duck’ execution for 130 years after final pleas fail

Execution became first by lame duck president for 130 years

US government executes Brandon Bernard after final pleas fail (Getty Images)

The US government has executed Brandon Bernard after final legal pleas and calls for clemency on his behalf were rejected.

The execution broke a 130-year precedent of pausing “lame duck” executions until the incoming president is sworn into office.

Bernard, who was 18 when he took part in a 1999 double murder in Texas, was killed by lethal injection at the Terre Haute federal prison in Indiana on Thursday night.

His execution was delayed by more than three hours as the final pleas for his life were made to the Supreme Court and Donald Trump.

But the Supreme Court denied a stay of execution and Bernard was taken to the death chamber.

Justices Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor dissented and wanted to grant a stay in the execution.

He was then executed with a lethal dose of pentobarbital when the president did not intervene to commute his sentence and was pronounced dead at 8.27pm CST.

“I’m sorry,” said Bernard as he directed his last words to the families of the couple he killed, according to the Associated Press.

“That’s the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day.”

Bernard, 40, became the youngest person by the age at which the offence was committed, to be executed in the US for nearly seven decades.

“Tonight, those of us who loved Brandon Bernard - and we are many - are full of righteous anger and deep sadness at the actions of the federal government in taking his life,” said his lawyer Robert C Owen.

“Brandon’s life mattered. To us, his legal team, to his two beautiful and talented daughters, to his mother, and sister, and to the countless people around the country who came to know him and his story in recent weeks.

“Brandon made one terrible mistake at age 18. But he did not kill anyone, and he never stopped feeling shame and profound remorse for his actions in the crime that took the lives of Todd and Stacie Bagley.”

Bernard became the ninth person executed by Donald Trump’s administration since the federal government began executions again this summer after a 17-year hiatus.

It was one of five lame duck executions that are  planned in the final weeks of Mr Trump’s presidency.

Bernard’s lawyers had asked a federal appeals court to temporarily block the execution while they investigate claims prosecutors unconstitutionally withheld evidence that would have persuaded some jurors to give him a life sentence.

Bernard and accomplice, Christopher Vialva, were sentenced to death in 2000 for the 1999 deaths of Todd Bagley and Stacie Bagley, married youth ministers.

Prosecutors said at trial that it was Vialva who shot the victims at Fort Hood Army base, which gives the case federal jurisdiction.

Vialva was executed for his role in the killings in September.

Alfred Bourgeois, 56, is also set to die in the federal death chamber in Indiana on Friday.

He was convicted of killing his two-year-old daughter in 2002 at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station.