Brandon Bernard: US government set to execute man despite last-minute pleas

It is one of five executions planned by Donald Trump’s administration in final weeks of presidency

Government set to execute Brandon Bernard despite last-minute pleas (Getty Images)

The US government is set to execute Brandon Bernard on Thursday night barring any last-minute intervention.

Bernard, who was 18 when he took part in a 1999 double murder in Texas, will die by lethal injection at an Indiana federal prison.

Now 40, Bernard will be the youngest person by the age at which the offense was committed, to be executed in the US for nearly seven decades.

Bernard will be the ninth person executed by Donald Trump’s administration since the federal government began executions again this summer after a 17-year break from executions in the country.

It is one of five lame duck executions that are  planned in the final weeks of Mr Trump’s presidency and is set to go ahead at 1700 CET [2200 GMT] at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The executions have broken a 130-year precedent of pausing them until the incoming president is sworn into office.

His lawyers had asked a federal appeals court to temporarily block the execution while they investigate claims prosecutors unconstitutionally withheld evidence that would have persuaded some jurors to give him a life sentence.

Reality TV star and campaigner Kim Kardashian is among those asking for clemency to be granted in the case, and even some jurors from the case have signed a petition asking Mr Trump to cancel the execution.

Democratic senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Cory Booker of New Jersey also asked the president to grant clemency and argued that "the death penalty in the United States is fatally flawed in its imposition and is disproportionately imposed based on race”.

Bernard and accomplice, Christopher Vialva, were sentenced to death in 2000 for the 1999 deaths of Todd Bagley and Stacie Bagley, married youth ministers.

Prosecutors said at trial that it was Vialva who shot the victims at Fort Hood Army base, which gives the case federal jurisdiction.

Vialva was executed for his role in the killings in September.

Alfred Bourgeois, 56, is also set to die in the federal death chamber in Indiana on Friday.

He was convicted of killing his two-year-old daughter in 2002 at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station.