Mr. Bernard, among other crimes, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
“I’m sure this guy from Brandon didn’t act like a kid when he committed the murders,” said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a legal organization that supports crime victims and the death penalty.
Mr Vialva and Mr Bernard were brought to justice together. Like Mr. Brown, two of the other defendants, Christopher Lewis and Tony Sparks, were too young to be sentenced to death.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Lewis, who were 15 years old at the time of the crime, pleaded guilty and testified to the prosecution. Mr Sparks, who was 16 at the time of the crime, also pleaded guilty. Mr. Brown and Lewis have since been released from federal custody and are projected to be released in 2030, according to the Sparks Bureau database. He was originally sentenced to life imprisonment without imprisonment.
The courts will not accept Mr. Bernard’s recent requests because of the delay in execution. As may be the case in Mr Bernard’s last days, his lawyers claimed the government had suppressed an expert opinion showing that Mr Bernard had the lowest status within the gang to which the government claimed he and other defendants were linked.
The repressed opinion, according to his lawyers, would have changed the calculation of the jury’s relative guilt. In September, Fifth Round denied Mr. Bernard any postponement of the lawsuit. His lawyers have filed a similar case in an Indian federal court, which a judge denied on Wednesday.
Opponents of Bernard’s execution include one of the case’s jurors, Gary McClung, a 56-year-old handyman who lives in Centerville. In an interview, he said he felt some concern about recommending the jury’s death. verdict, but decided not to fight in a coordinated way against the seemingly consensus.
Angela Moore, who represented the government in the appeal of the case of Mr. Bernard and Vialva, has since become an opponent of the death penalty. As a young lawyer at the time, the case “looked like a pen in my cap,” he said, and although he had fears about the case, he didn’t think the delivery of those concerns would have changed it.
