"That's the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day." "I'm sorry," he said, lifting his head and looking at witness-room windows. On Thursday night, as Bernard lay on a gurney before receiving the lethal injection, he directed his last words to the family of the couple he played a role in killing, speaking with striking calm for someone who knew he was about to die. They said Bourgeois had tests that demonstrated his IQ was around 70, well below average, and that his childhood history buttressed their claims of his disability. "Up to that point, Bourgeois had lived a life which, in broad outlines, did not manifest gross intellectual deficiencies," the court said.Īttorneys argued that such findings stem from misunderstandings about disabilities. She died the next day in a hospital of brain injuries.Īfter his 2004 conviction in federal court in southern Texas, a judge rejected claims stemming from his alleged intellectual disability, noting he did not receive a diagnosis until after he had been sentenced to death.
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Again, angered by her toilet training, he grabbed her inside the truck by her shoulders and slammed her head on the windows and dashboard four times, court filings say. It was on a trucking run to Corpus Christi, Texas, when he took the toddler with him that he ended up killing her. Her toilet training allegedly enraged Bourgeois and he would sometimes force her to sleep on a training toilet. Prosecutors also said he sexually abused her. Over the next month, Bourgeois whipped the girl with an electrical cord, burned her feet with a cigarette lighter and hit her in the head with a plastic baseball bat so hard that her head swelled - then refused to seek medical treatment for her, court documents say. Bourgeois was living in Louisiana at the time with his wife and their two children.
In Bourgeois' case, the crimes stand out as particularly brutal because they involved his young daughter.Īccording to court filings, he gained temporary custody of the child, referred to in court papers only as "JG," after a 2002 paternity suit from a Texas woman.
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Several high-profile figures, including reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, appealed to Trump to commute Bernard's sentence to life in prison, citing, among other things, Bernard's youth at the time and the remorse he has expressed over years. Bernard, who was 18 at the time of the killings, was a rare execution of a person who was in his teens when his crime was committed. On Thursday, Brandon Bernard was put to death for his part in a 1999 killing of a religious couple from Iowa after he and other teenage members of a street gang abducted and robbed Todd and Stacie Bagley in Texas.
Several appeals courts have concluded that neither evidence nor criminal law on intellectual disability support the claims by Bourgeois' legal team. 20 inauguration of death-penalty foe Joe Biden, a Democrat, has deprived their client his rights to exhaust his legal options.
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The series of executions after Election Day, the first in late November, is the first time in over 130 years where federal executions have occurred during a lame-duck period.īourgeois' lawyers contend that the apparent hurry by the Republican president to get executions in before the Jan. Three more executions are planned in January. He would be the second person executed this week at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Lawyers for 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois say he has an IQ that puts him in the intellectually disabled category, and they contend that should have made him ineligible for the death penalty under federal law.īourgeois would be the 10th federal death-row inmate put to death since federal executions resumed under President Donald Trump in July after a 17-year hiatus.
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The Trump administration plans to continue its unprecedented series of post-election federal executions Friday by putting to death a Louisiana truck driver who severely abused his 2-year-old daughter for weeks in 2002, then killed her by slamming her head against a truck's windows and dashboard.