Multiple requests for clemency – including from Kim Kardashian – have failed to prevent convicted murderer Brandon Bernard from being executed in Indiana on Thursday. With the execution, Donald Trump has broken the 130-year-old habit of not allowing executions to continue as outgoing president.
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Brandon Bernard (40) was sentenced to death in 1999, at the age of 18, for his involvement in the robbery of Todd and Stacie Bagley. A co-perpetrator, who was already executed earlier this year, is said to have shot the young couple. Bernard would have set fire to the car with their bodies hidden in it. According to the then prosecutors, that would eventually have led to their deaths, according to the defense the two were already dead at that time.
Bernard was given a lethal injection at 9:27 pm (local time) on Thursday evening in the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. At 40, he is the youngest perpetrator in almost 70 years to be executed. He addressed his last words to the relatives of the victims: “I’m so sorry. That’s all I can say that completely captures how I feel now and how I felt that day. ”
“He had repented”
A total of tens of thousands of petitions for clemency were filed to prevent the execution, even up to two hours before, but the US Supreme Court dismissed them all. Kim Kardashian, among others, argued for Bernard. “He was only eighteen at the time of the facts, he was not the shooter, expressed regret and behaved exemplary in prison all these years,” the reality star argued, among other things. In the past her efforts have been able to avert multiple death sentences, this time her plea yielded nothing. “I’m really not good about this,” she wrote on Twitter. “They killed Brandon. He had repented, so hopeful and positive to the end. And more importantly, he was sorry, so sorry for the pain he had caused others. ”
(read more below the tweets)
