CHICAGO — A day before the federal government executed a Texas man for the killing of an Iowa couple when he was 18, celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz pleaded with then-President Donald Trump — a former client — to call the execution off.
During a Dec. 9, 2020, call to the White House, Dershowitz told Trump that Brandon Bernard, at 40, wasn’t the man he was when Todd and Stacie Bagley were killed in 1999 and that he deserved to have his sentence commuted to life in prison.
Bernard was executed the next day.
Secrecy was a hallmark of the 13 federal executions during the last six months of Trump’s presidency. Although reporters were allowed to witness them, it was impossible to know at the time what was happening behind the scenes.
Fresh details have emerged since the executions, including from Dershowitz, who spoke recently to The Associated Press. The fuller picture reveals that officials cut corners and relied on a pliant Supreme Court to get the executions done, even when some — including Trump himself, in Bernard’s case — agreed that there might be valid reasons not to proceed with them all.
Observers assumed it was Trump’s initiative. But in his 2022 book, “One Damn Thing After Another,” Trump’s attorney general at the time of the executions, Bill Barr, suggested it was actually his.
Barr said he spoke to Trump just once about the plans. Regarding capital punishment, Trump asked, “Why do you support it?” Barr wrote that Trump seemed satisfied when he answered that for brutal killings, it was “the only punishment that fit the crime.”
In 2019, Barr approved the use of pentobarbital in executions despite evidence it might cause pulmonary edema, making it possible for them to resume.
To be selected, an inmate’s guilt had to be certain and their victims had to have been uniquely vulnerable, Barr wrote.
It wasn’t obvious Bernard met that criteria.
The kidnapping and robbery of the young couple who were on a Texas religious retreat was brutal. They were locked in their car’s trunk for hours, begging for their lives, before accomplice Christopher Vialva shot them in the head.
Bernard’s role was murkier. He allegedly set the car ablaze with the bodies inside. During the trial, prosecutors said smoke in Stacie’s lungs indicated the fire had killed her. That evidence was disputed.
By all accounts, Bernard transformed himself in prison and encouraged fellow inmates to follow his example. Introspective and polite, he didn’t commit a single rules infraction during two decades in prison.
Each execution required up to 300 staff and contractors. Government lawyers cited those logistics in arguing against any delays.
Unfailingly, the conservative-tilted Supreme Court cleared all legal obstacles.
Without explaining why, the Supreme Court rejected Bernard’s final request for a stay on his execution day.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that whether prosecutors exaggerated his gang status knowing he held the lowest rank deserved more scrutiny.
Within hours, executioners poked an IV line into each of Bernard’s arms. Bernard was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m.