As Donald Trump’s presidency comes to an end, federal executions are on the rise in the United States. The government of the Republican billionaire proceeded, Thursday, December 10, to a new lethal injection, despite calls for clemency and the outbreak of Covid-19 among the executioners. Brandon Bernard, a 40-year-old African-American, was executed for participating in a double murder in 1999 in Texas, when he was just over 18.
Half a million people have signed petitions asking the current occupant of the White House to commute his sentence to life imprisonment, highlighting in particular his immaturity at the time of the crime and his good behavior in prison. “At 18 years and a few months, his brain had not finished developing,” notably pleaded reality TV star Kim Kardashian. With other young people, he took part in the kidnapping of a couple of white pastors, then shot and burned in his car. Some of the attackers were under 17 and escaped the death penalty. Two have already been released from prison.
The ninth performance since July
But the perpetrator, Christopher Vialva, 19 at the time, and Brandon Bernard, who set the vehicle on fire, were sentenced to death in 2000 by a federal court because the crime had taken place on military terrain. The first received a lethal injection in September at Terre-Haute Penitentiary, Indiana. The second suffered the same fate Thursday evening after the rejection by the Supreme Court of a final appeal. “The execution of Brandon is a stain on the US justice system,” his lawyer said in a statement. “Brandon made a terrible mistake when he was 18 years old but (…) he never stopped feeling shame and deep remorse for his actions. ”
This is the ninth federal execution since July, after the practice was put on hold for 17 years. Despite Donald Trump’s presidential defeat – which he refuses to recognize – his government has planned four more executions before the January 20 swearing-in of Democrat Joe Biden, opposed to federal executions. For 131 years, however, the tradition has been that outgoing presidents postpone executions pending the arrival of their successor. “The government is not at all in tune with the approach” of its predecessors, since there have only been three federal executions in the past 45 years, notes Ngozi Ndulue, research director at the Center d ‘ information on the death penalty (DPIC). It is just as “out of step” vis-à-vis developments in the country, where new death sentences and support for the death penalty are at historic lows, she adds. But above all, she notes, “he stubbornly pursues executions in the midst of a global pandemic, it’s startling.”
A health risk
The Covid-19 is raging in the United States, where more than 3,000 people died from the virus in a single day on Wednesday, with a total toll in the country at more than 290,000 deaths. Faced with the health risk, even the states most attached to the death penalty, such as Texas, have suspended executions. The government of Donald Trump, he persists although six members of the team of executioners who participated in the last federal execution were diagnosed positive for the new coronavirus in the following week, as the spiritual advisor of the condemned.
In this context, more and more voices – editorialists, UN experts, Catholic bishops… – condemn his stubbornness. “Our officials are just trying to score political points,” said Thursday Gary Witte, a priest who came to demonstrate in front of the Department of Justice in Washington against this “lack of humanity”. Donald Trump “is already breaking records of executions, he has no reason to continue, apart from annoyance,” added one of the organizers, Abraham Bonowitz, 53. All these convicts have committed “horrible crimes”, retorts the Minister of Justice Bill Barr, who assures to limit himself to “apply the sentences declared by the courts”.
Ngozi Ndulue stresses, however, that the prisoners executed this summer, when the country was crossed by a large anti-racist mobilization, were all white, which for her translates “a discretionary choice”. Conversely, the last on the list are, with the exception of one white woman, all black, which for the researcher reflects the over-representation of African Americans on death row. “Familiar problems” linked to racist prejudices in the penal system which, she deplores, remain relevant even in times of “extraordinary executions”.
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