I have no obvious opposition to capital punishment as a matter of principle, although in practice, the costs of exacting the death penalty from initial trials and appeals to the execution itself vastly supersede that of lifelong prison sentences. Furthermore, the number of costly death penalties pursued are orders of magnitude greater than those executed.
The same President Trump who signed landmark prison reform into law has also resumed federal executions, and if we are to accept the death penalty as a valid punishment, the list of criminals sent to the chopping block thus far have deserved it. Of the eight federal criminals executed during Trump’s tenure, all have committed murder. Half also raped their victims, three of whom were minors. (The fourth rapist had previously served time for child molestation and statutory rape.) Those who did not rape their victims were involved in uniquely perverse schemes, such as Daniel Lewis Lee, who murdered a family of three and planned to create a white ethnostate with stolen arms, and Dustin Lee Honken, who murdered five people to conceal his meth operation.
Brandon Bernard, the man due to become the ninth federal inmate executed on Thursday, does not deserve this fate.
Lawyer-turned-celebrity Alan Dershowitz and celebrity-turned-lawyer-in-training Kim Kardashian have reportedly joined forces to convince Trump to commute Bernard’s sentence to life in prison without parole. Attorney General William Barr is said to favor following through on the execution. There is no question that doing so would set an unseemly precedent for who qualifies for the death penalty, a practice favored by a slim (and falling) majority of the public when the person in question is found guilty of murder.
Bernard was found guilty of murder, but both jurors and prosecutors who dictated Bernard’s fate now concur with Dershowitz and Kardashian, and with good reason.
In 1999, 18-year-old Bernard and 17-year-old Terry Brown left three of their friends who had hitched a ride from two strangers, Todd and Stacie Bagley, to go to a convenience store and drop job applications at a Winn-Dixie. In the meantime, Christopher Vialva led the other two boys to turn the ride into a car-jacking turned tragic, looting and forcing the Bagleys at gunpoint into the trunk of their car. After the three contacted Bernard and Brown, the former purchased lighter fluid before the two rejoined the gang. Bernard poured lighter fluid over the car, and Vialva shot the Bagleys, seemingly killing them. Bernard then lit the car on fire.
During the trial, prosecutors argued that Stacie was actually still alive, bringing about murder charges against Bernard. Since then, that point has been heavily disputed, as have Bernard’s complicity and stature in the scheme.
Regardless of age, neither of Bernard’s high-profile defenders believe Bernard deserves release. No matter how extenuating the circumstances of Bernard’s abusive upbringing or limited stature in the gang, trying to cover up a crime as heinous as murder is ample reason enough to sentence a man spend the rest of his life in prison. But is it enough for the state to play God?
Five of the surviving nine jurors do not believe so, and Angela Moore, the prosecutor who defended Bernard’s death sentence on appeal, concurs, arguing that scientific advances in brain development demonstrate that although Bernard was a legal adult, his mental reasoning was not adult in nature. Because they were all legally minors at the time, Brown and the two other accomplices, Christopher Lewis and Tony Sparks, all received less severe sentences than Bernard. Brown and Lewis have completed their sentences.
Vialva, the undisputed ringleader of the gang and mastermind of the murder, became the seventh criminal during Trump’s tenure to be executed. Under the current standards of who has historically qualified for the death penalty, few could contest that the punishment more than fit the crime.
But should Bernard, reportedly a model prisoner who has used an infraction-free past two decades to teach at-risk youth not to follow in his footsteps, suffer the same fate? That the answer is not unequivocally “yes” means that Bernard deserves Trump’s clemency before it’s too late.
