Home » World » On the eve of an execution, Kim Kardashian calls on Trump for leniency

On the eve of an execution, Kim Kardashian calls on Trump for leniency

Reality star Kim Kardashian on Wednesday called on President Donald Trump to spare Brandon Bernard, who is due to be executed the next day for a double murder committed when he was just 18.

“My heart is broken by this execution and I call on @realDonaldTrump to commute Brandon’s sentence and let him serve his sentence in jail,” she wrote on Twitter.

The star, who has already mobilized on several occasions for death row inmates whose guilt she doubted, this time does not question the role of Brandon Bernard in the murder of two young pastors in 1999.

He “participated in this crime, but his role was minor compared to the other young people involved, two of whom have already been released from prison,” she said in a tweet at the end of November. “At 18 years and a few months, her brain had not finished developing,” she also pleaded.

In 1999, he had participated, along with other young African-Americans, in the kidnapping of Todd and Stacie Bagley in order to force them to withdraw cash. The couple were eventually shot and burned in their car.

Some of the attackers were under 17 and escaped the death penalty.

The perpetrator, Christopher Vialva, 19 at the time, and Brandon Bernard, who set the vehicle on fire, were both sentenced to death in 2000 by a federal court because the crime was held on military terrain.

The first received a lethal injection in September in Terre-Haute penitentiary in Indiana, and, barring a last-minute reprieve, the second is to suffer the same fate Thursday evening.

As the deadline approaches, tens of thousands of people, including jurors who sentenced him and a former prosecutor in charge of the case, asked the president to commute his sentence. They notably highlighted his good behavior in prison and his lack of maturity at the time of the events.

For their part, his lawyers tried, in vain, to obtain a review of the trial, presenting new documents which, according to them, prove that he played a “peripheral” role in the crime.

Barring a last-minute reprieve, Brandon Bernard will be the eighth death row inmate killed since the resumption of federal executions in July after a 17-year hiatus.

Despite his presidential defeat and the pandemic, which has prompted states to suspend almost all executions, Donald Trump’s government has planned four more by the time he leaves the White House on January 20.

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