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“Brandon Bernard was a different person from the teenager arrested over 20 years earlier. Up until the end, he did not think he would be executed because he knew he had reformed.”
Brandon Bernard called and emailed me daily in the two months before his execution. We spoke a few hours before he was executed and some of our last words were spent discussing his last words. For the first time, his optimism was gone. Even the day before, he sounded hopeful because he had heard that the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney strongly recommended his sentence be commuted to life in prison.
Brandon read his speech to the Pardon Office to me before presenting it, and the profound level of remorse he expressed brought me to tears. He was a different person from the teenager arrested over 20 years earlier. Up until the end, he did not think he would be executed because he knew he had reformed.
I began writing to death row prisoners after reading Bryan Stevenson’s book “Just Mercy” about an innocent man condemned to death row. Books often change my course; I read a book on factory farming a few years ago and haven’t eaten meat since. After reading “Just Mercy,” I sent out postcards to about a dozen death row inmates across the U.S. When I started what my husband, family and friends universally consider an odd hobby, I had no idea how gratifying and life-altering writing death row prisoners would become.
When we first began exchanging letters a year ago, I warned Brandon that I had one other pen pal at Terre Haute federal penitentiary. In my experience, inmates do not want to write someone with multiple pen pals at the same facility out of legitimate concerns over privacy and safety. Brandon’s immediate response was, “Well, then that makes me one of the two luckiest men at Terre Haute.” To call himself lucky after over two decades of solitary confinement 23 hours a day in a six-by-eight-foot cell was the first of many lessons in gratitude Brandon taught me.
Brandon was 18 when he took part in a robbery gone wrong. He had no prior history of violence. Brandon’s friends carjacked a white couple, Todd and Stacey Bagley, youth ministers innocently offering a ride to kids purportedly in need. Later, Brandon rejoined the group only to see Christopher Vialva, the ringleader of the crime, fatally shoot Todd and Stacey in the head at close range. The man who had just shot two people in the head and still had a gun in his hand then ordered Brandon and three other teens to set the car on fire with the couple’s bodies inside. Brandon did as he was told.
At trial, Brandon’s court-appointed lawyer made no opening statement, meaning he offered the jury no alternative perspective on the charges. Brandon was the only accomplice not given an opportunity to plead guilty. The other accomplices pleaded out and received prison sentences; two are home with their families now.
Five of the nine surviving jurors later did a public about-face, stating that they would not have voted for the death penalty had prosecutors disclosed all facts at trial and had Brandon’s own lawyer competently defended him.
Brandon was falsely portrayed as a hardened high-level gang member. Prosecutors suppressed evidence by their own gang expert that the gang had a 13-tier hierarchy with Brandon at the very bottom. Brandon never got the chance to clarify his case in court — it remained the story poorly told at trial two decades earlier. Five of the nine surviving jurors later did a public about-face, stating that they would not have voted for the death penalty had prosecutors disclosed all facts at trial and had Brandon’s own lawyer competently defended him.
In her dissent written hours before Brandon’s execution, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the execution was taking place “despite troubling allegations that the Government secured his death sentence by withholding exculpatory evidence and knowingly eliciting false testimony against him. [He] has never had the opportunity to test the merits of those claims in court. Now he never will.” At 40, Brandon was the youngest person executed by the federal government in nearly 70 years.
Brandon loved his life, even in its limited capacity on death row. He did not have a single disciplinary infraction in his decades behind bars. This is no small feat given that death row is like a prison within a prison, with countless oppressive rules and ensuing frustrations.
