Convicted murderer seeks Trump clemency, citing jurors' regret for death penalty
By Jonathan Allen
(Reuters) - A convicted murderer who is scheduled to be executed by the U.S. government next month appealed to President Donald Trump for clemency on Tuesday, citing regrets by five jurors from his trial who now say he should instead serve life in prison.
At trial in 2000, a jury found Brandon Bernard and an accomplice, Christopher Vialva, guilty of carjacking and murdering Todd and Stacie Bagley, married Christian youth ministers from Iowa, on the Fort Hood army base in Texas the previous year.
Five of the nine surviving jurors submitted sworn affidavits or statements to be included in Bernard's clemency petition in which they said that Bernard's lawyers did a poor job defending a client who was 18 at the time of the crime.
"To me, it seemed like his attorneys were going through the motions and nothing more," Calvin Kruger, the jury foreman, wrote in his affidavit.
Bernard's lawyers say information showing that Bernard held a lowly position in the gang that killed the Bagleys was not presented to the jury, and that he was not present when the Bagleys were abducted by Vialva and forced into the trunk of their car. Later, after Vialva, who was 19 at the time, shot the couple in the trunk, Bernard followed Vialva's orders to set the car on fire, according to trial records.
While all five jurors still agree that both Bernard and Vialva were guilty, they said that Bernard did not seem to have intended to kill the Bagleys. His execution is set for Dec. 10.
Vialva was executed with lethal injections in September, the first Black man to face the punishment since the Trump administration resumed carrying out the death penalty in the federal justice system after a 17-year hiatus. During that time, some states have continued to carry out executions of people convicted of capital crimes in state courts.
One of the five jurors, Gary McClung, said in a telephone interview that he regretted his vote for the death penalty for Bernard, whom he thought got swept along in a crime he did not set out to commit.
"I had misgivings from the beginning," he said. "I just didn't stand for my convictions as I should have initially during the trial, and it's something that has weighed on my conscience for a good while."
He said the two defendants had strikingly different demeanors during the trial: Vialva was "pretty harsh, sometimes a little indifferent to what was going on;" Bernard, he said, "seemed pretty broken" and "overwhelmed by the whole situation."
The U.S. Department of Justice, which fields clemency petitions on the president's behalf, did not respond to a request for comment.
The family of the Bagleys could not be reached for comment, but the mother of Todd Bagley, Georgia Bailey, said in a statement after Vialva's execution that Trump's resumption of executions had brought her family closure and justice.
The U.S. government has executed seven men this year, more than twice as many as all of Trump's predecessors combined going back to 1963. Three more executions are scheduled in November and December, including that of Bernard.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; editing by Grant McCool)
