The Trump administration executed 40-year-old Brandon Bernard on Thursday, his punishment for acting as an accomplice to a crime when he was 18 years old.
The government went through with the killing despite high-profile opposition from 5 of 9 surviving jurors who sentenced Bernard to death, the prosecutor who defended his death sentence on appeal, several members of Congress, 23 current and former prosecutors, reality television star and criminal justice reform advocate Kim Kardashian West, and The Washington Post’s editorial board. Hours before the execution, controversial lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr — who worked on President Donald Trump’s legal team during his impeachment — joined Bernard’s defense team.
Bernard was killed by lethal injection at 9:27 p.m. The Supreme Court denied a last-minute stay of execution for Bernard, with Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting.