A protest against the death sentence in the United States in the case of Brandon Bernard.Austen Leake / AP
The Donald Trump Administration tonight carried out the first of five death sentences it plans to carry out before leaving power, on January 20, a
sinister
sprint
unprecedented in recent history.
Brandon Bernard, 40, died at 9.27 am by lethal injection in an Indiana prison for participating in the murder of a married couple as a teenager.
This Friday, if a request for postponement or clemency does not prevent it, another inmate will join him, convicted of beating his two-year-old daughter to death.
According to the Associated Press, no president used the death penalty during the transition of powers since Grover Cleveland in the 1890s.
The Bernard case had been fought by activists for years and Kim Kardashian, deeply involved in the fight for the improvement of the penal system, had asked President Trump for clemency.
The lawyers also requested a postponement
in extremis
to the Supreme Court this Thursday afternoon, but it was denied.
For 17 years, no president had carried out federal executions of death sentences.
Trump took them up again and already has nine.
Joe Biden, however, rejects them.
60 days have changed the ending of this man.
Tonight he addressed his last words to the family of the victims.
"I'm sorry, those are the only words I can say that capture what I feel today and what I felt that day," he said.
"I wish I could undo what I did, but I can't," he added in a speech that lasted three minutes before he died.
Bernard was 18 years old when, on June 21, 1999, he and four other young people kidnapped and killed Todd and Stacie Bagley, a couple in their twenties returning from mass in Killeen, Texas.
The gang found the couple during a stop on the route, in a shop, and asked them to take them, when they agreed, they put them in the truck at gunpoint and kidnapped them in order to rob them.
For hours, they drove trying to use their credit cards.
They then pulled the vehicle onto the road and one of them, Christopher Vialva (executed in September) shot them in the head.
Bernard then set fire to the car to hide evidence.
The man, Todd, died instantly, but a government expert argued at trial that she, Stacie, had soot in her airways, indicating she was alive when she started the car, a key issue in Brandon's conviction.
Georgia Bagley, Todd's mother, tonight thanked Trump for offering "closure" and thanked the deceased inmate's apology.
"The apology and the regret help my heart a lot," he said, "I forgive you."
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