After Brandon Bernard's Execution, Sister Helen Prejean Calls Out the Death Penalty's Cruelty
Nearly half an hour past 9 p.m. last night, the state executed Brandon Bernard by lethal injection. His death comes in spite of a high-profile and bipartisan campaign to spare his life, including the support of the prosecutor and five of the sentencing jurors from his case. He was the ninth person to be executed since July after a 17-year hiatus and the first to be federally executed during a lame duck presidency in 130 years. By the time of his death, Bernard, 40, had spent more than half his life behind bars.
Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun and one of the most well-known anti-death penalty advocates, spoke to Bernard and his legal team moments before the execution was carried out. "I have never met anyone quite like Brandon, who was so poised about living or dying," she tells BAZAAR.com. "I think he had just reached a point spiritually in his life that he had accepted responsibility and was truly sorry for what he had done."
In 1999, Bernard, then 18 years old, was convicted in the Texas killing of Stacie and Todd Bagley. He was one of five young men involved in the double murder-robbery and, as a low-ranked member of the gang, was tasked to get rid of the murder evidence by burning the car with the bodies. Christopher Vialva, who was executed in September, shot and killed the Bagleys.
Since then, Bernard's lawyers have argued that the prosecution withheld evidence at the time of the trial that would have diminished his role in the murder. In the moments leading up to the execution, the Supreme Court rejected a request to delay his execution by two weeks. Pleas to President Donald Trump to commute his sentence were also ignored.
His last words, as reported to The Associated Press, were toward the family of the Bagleys. "I'm sorry," he said. "That's the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day."
BAZAAR.com spoke to Sister Helen Prejean, a staunch opponent of capital punishment who has been calling for an end to the death penalty since the 1980s, about how the fight continues to stop the four remaining federal executions set to take place before President-Elect Joe Biden is inaugurated next month. Prejean also touched on the racial and economic inequities prevalent within death row and how she plans on remembering Bernard's life and spirit.
The five federal executions that are scheduled in this lame duck period of the Trump administration breaks with precedent from the past 130 years. Could you contextualize what’s happening right now and why they’ve made this move?
It's interesting in one way because, as states are shutting down the death penalty dramatically, we have this aberration which highlights something that's been broken in the way it was set up by the Supreme Court from the beginning. Because, in the Gregg decision, when the Supreme Court set up the death penalty, it set up the criteria that it was not for ordinary murders, but only the worst of the worst. And nobody really knows what that means. What would you call an ordinary murder? And then this leaves the discretion to prosecutors to be able to go after death or not. If they don't go for death, people don't die. So, it just highlights that in the federal jurisdiction for 17 years, no one was killed.
But then, because you had this discretionary power in the hands of individuals like Donald Trump and Attorney General Barr, they decide to go for death. They will probably kill as many people as they can because they can–and it is such an aberration. It is such an atrocious thing that's happening. I think it's really jolting people to see that it's fundamentally flawed and it has been that way from the beginning. I have no doubt that President-Elect Biden will stop executions at the federal level and put an end to this bizarre, terrible situation of the people still left to die.
It's like Trump is trying to execute as fast as possible before Biden gets in. Lisa Montgomery [one of the five scheduled federal executions]–who was tortured and abused as a child, disconnected from reality because of what happened to her–did a terrible crime, but she is scheduled to be killed eight days before Biden takes office. And if you want to see a capricious, arbitrary application of death in the hands of very flawed human beings, here it is.
What you mentioned about prosecutorial discretion and flawed judgement seems to apply in the case of Brandon Bernard. The prosecutor in his trial has spoken out about not wanting him to be put to death.
And five of the nine jurors. All of this is also based on the assumption that it was a fair trial. When you look at what happened to Brandon at the trial, the prosecutor, first of all, put up this bogus expert who claimed that Brandon would be a future danger to society. And here he is, 20 years later, he never gets written up [in prison]. The prosecutor claimed that he directly killed the victims and that was wrong. He did not directly kill people. He came in at the end and didn't know anybody was going to be killed. The prosecutor said he was the mastermind of the gang, but he wasn't a mastermind. He was a low guy on the totem pole, but how does a jury know?
And then you hit an almost all-white jury, and here he is as a Black man and the killed couple is white. I mean, race just plays in it. The discretion of people given too much power than they can handle and the criteria that nobody knows what it means anyway–it is riddled with all these faults and failures.
A lot of critics of the death penalty have been pointing out the racial, economic, and social inequities that we see so often see on death row. Could you speak to this?
When you have what's supposed to be the "worst of the worst" as a criteria but nobody knows what that means, and then add the discretion of the person prosecuting, is anybody surprised that 75 percent of actual executions happened in the states that practiced slavery? They almost always occurred for the death of a white victim. The worst thing working against you is if you're a person of color who killed a white person, but where you really see race is who got killed and who cares, because roughly 50 percent of homicide victims in the United States are people of color. But if you don't value a life, you aren't outraged over the death of a person. That's how it really plays in.
And the Supreme Court had a chance in the McCleskey decision in the '80s. They were shown the pattern of how race of the victim is a driving force for when the death penalty is sought. But, they missed it. Their own bias, I think, prevented them from seeing. They decided racism had to be proven in an individual prosecutor and they wouldn't acknowledge that the pattern exists across the country.
The Supreme Court had overturned the death penalty in 1972, but, four years later, they put it back. What a number of people say is that it was a backlash from several states against the federal government for the desegregation of schools and in public places. "We want to be able to punish criminals as we see fit," and that is coded language for the legacy of racism.
In your essay for The Washington Post, you noted that 80 percent of Americans approved of the death penalty in 1993, but 36 percent of Americans favored a life sentence without parole instead of the death penalty by 2019. What do you think contributed to this dramatic change in public opinion?
Because there's been a steady, steady, steady education. And a huge factor is the huge number of mistakes that people are now aware of–and I had to learn that, too. I thought we'd never make a mistake. But, in fact, there are over 1,500 people who've been executed. For every nine executions, we've had to let one person go because we made a mistake. One in nine. That's huge. The American people were made to be afraid. We had this tough-on-crime rhetoric. "We have to put them in prison, they're natural born killers." It demonized people completely.
The other thing is that the execution process is a secret behind prison walls. You got to bring people close. People have good hearts and they're open to education. I've found that most of the American public have a knee-jerk reaction to the death penalty, but they're not educated on it. Once people know they can be safe, they let go of this desire in them to have the government to kill, because there's also a deep part of people that knows it's hard to trust government with that kind of power.
Fiscal conservatives are also coming around to that, that it costs millions and millions of dollars to kill one person. Think of what could be used of those tax dollars for public education, healthcare, programs for at-risk kids, and all the needs of people instead of putting all those resources into killing people.
There's a lot of people who feel ambivalent about ending the death penalty and there are others who think certain crimes warrant execution. What do you think these people get wrong when it comes to the death penalty?
It's called a designer death penalty. "Well, if somebody does this, they should get the death penalty." But how do you apply that? How do you administrate that? When you leave it in the hands of individuals who are part of a society and a culture and a context, then you begin to see that it's impossible to take that into any kind of pure application in any way.
The Catholic Church now has, after 1,600 years, reached a position of saying in no instances can we entrust the government the right to take the life of this citizen because of the inviolable dignity of the human person–even of those who've done terrible crimes.
There are still four remaining scheduled federal executions to take place before Biden is inaugurated next month. After Brandon's tragic death, how do you see the fight to end these executions continue on from here?
Each time, you have to resist, you have to raise your voice, you have to say, "Not in my name." And though it may not find its way into stony ground in the hearts of Trump and Barr, the people are beginning to listen. But it's really important when we become awake to an injustice, that we raise our voices in some way.
Representative Ayanna Pressley has bills in the House and I'd call attention to. One is H.R. 4052 to abolish the death penalty, period. President-Elect Biden can do a moratorium to stop executions, but it's just temporary. It's gonna take an act of Congress. So, that's one thing people can do to start raising your voice and support that. [Representative Pressley] has something called The People's Justice Guarantee for a reformed criminal justice system, less punitive, and helps communities, especially communities in poverty. I'd urge people to support those.
You've mentioned on Twitter that you spoke to Brandon and his legal team the day before the execution was carried out. Would you be able to talk a bit about what those last-minute efforts to appeal the execution looked like and how you want people to remember Brandon?
I think Brandon lived every day of his life in remorse and sorrow for the part he had played in the death of Stacie and Todd Bagley. He just felt so bad about what happened. He didn't directly commandeer everything that happened, but he knew he was a part of it.
Honestly, I have accompanied six people through execution and I've been with them in their last hours. I have never met anybody quite like Brandon who was so poised about living or dying. I think he had just reached a point spiritually in his life that he had accepted responsibility and was truly sorry for what he had done.
And he had spent his life getting along with everybody at the prison–with the correctional officers, with the other inmates. One of the things he said is, "I've tried to do as my mama taught me to do. The way you treat people is the way you're going to be treated." He was unafraid. Any of us getting the news–suppose you go in and get a cancer report and hear you got two months left to live–the trauma to a human being to hear that your days are numbered. That's why the essence of the death penalty is practically torture as you begin to anticipate dying.
He did have the loving support around him. He had a wonderful team of lawyers who there with him at the end, and he had a loving family. And that makes a difference too. I think that really helped him to have such dignity in his life and such authenticity. So when we had the meeting the day before he died, it was two hours and there were jokes and funny stories and sometimes profound things about how you live your life, how you face your death, caring about people.
And then those last hours of his life, I got a text from one of the people on his team, Jen Davis. I'm looking at my watch, you know, I've stopped doing everything. I've lit a candle to pray for Brandon because six o'clock was the scheduled time. I get this text from Jen Davis and she goes, "We're still talking to Brandon. They haven't come for him. It's very odd. We don't know what's going on." That was like at 6:08 p.m. The longer that it went, the more relieved that they felt, then they were laughing and joking and I was texting back, "Look, the longer he's in the land of the living and the more he's back from that cliff, the better chance he's got." And then they came for him to kill him. And that's part of the cruelty, too. They were looking at the legal issues and so they extend that wait to death. They get your hope up again that you're going to live, then they took him away and they killed him.
We cannot entrust fallible people and the arrogance of human beings to decide that your life is finished and you're incapable of growing anymore. Who has the wisdom to determine that about human beings? Human beings can never be identified completely with the worst act of their life. We're all worth more than the worst act of our life. Just look at Brandon and how he developed in his life to the very end.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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