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Thread: Brandon Anthony Micah Bernard - Federal Execution - December 10, 2020

  1. #11
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Death Row Inmates Alleging Judge Was 'Impaired' at Trials Lose on Appeal

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has turned down the appeals of two death row inmates who argued their convictions should be overturned because their trials were presided over by a disgraced former federal judge whom they allege was “impaired” during their proceedings.

    Walter Smith, who served as a U.S district judge in Waco for 32 years, was punished by the Fifth Circuit in 2015 after it concluded he made unwanted sexual advances against a female court employee in 1998. The employee also alleged that Smith had been drinking before some of his interactions with her, and that Smith’s court clerk had to cancel his hearings because he had “been in the hospital” and was “not functioning.” Smith retired from the bench in 2016, which allowed him to avoid impeachment and keep his lifetime salary.

    In 2000, Smith presided over the trials of Christopher Andre Vialva and Brandon Bernard, who were convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for killing Todd and Stacie Bagley on federal property during a carjacking, sentences the Fifth Circuit affirmed on direct appeal in 2003.

    Vialva and Bernard both filed subsequent habeas corpus petitions before a district court in 2017, arguing that Smith was unfit to conduct proceedings in their cases because of his “impairments.” The motions also alleged Smith committed numerous errors during their trial and subsequent habeas proceedings, and attached several other documents to their pleadings, including the Fifth Circuit’s order in Smith’s misconduct proceeding, an excerpt of the deposition from the court employee who alleged misconduct against Smith, and a 2017 article from Texas Lawyer detailing Smith’s misconduct proceedings and his decision to retire.

    A district court judge denied Vialva and Bernard’s successive habeas corpus writs for lack of jurisdiction, noting their merit-based arguments had already been decided in the case, and that their alleged procedural defects were simply an attempt to circumvent the limits Congress placed on successive habeas petitions.

    In its recent decision, the Fifth Circuit panel agreed with the district court, and denied Vialva and Bernard habeas corpus review for a second time.

    “Although they purport to attack the integrity of their prior habeas proceedings, Bernard’s and Vialva’s invocation of defective procedure rests substantially on a merits-based challenge. To begin with, evidence from Judge Smith’s misconduct investigation does not credibly implicate the procedural integrity of Bernard’s and Vialva’s prosecutions or subsequent habeas proceedings,” the Fifth Circuit wrote in a per curiam opinion.

    “Evidence that Judge Smith engaged in unrelated misconduct in 1998 or that he neglected certain recusal requirements during the 2014 misconduct investigation does not raise an inference of defects in the habeas proceedings at issue here,” the court concluded. “The allegations offer no evidence—beyond gross speculation—that Judge Smith was, as Bernard and Vialva repeatedly assert, ‘impaired’ or ‘unfit’ to oversee their 2000 trial and subsequent habeas proceedings.”

    Jared Tyler, a Houston attorney who represents Vialva on appeal, and John Robert Carpenter, a Washington lawyer who represents Bernard on appeal, did not return calls for comment.

    Joseph H. Gay Jr., a Western District of Texas assistant U.S. attorney who opposed Vialva and Bernard’s subsequent habeas petitions, declined to comment.

    https://www.law.com/texaslawyer/2018...20180817155525
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  2. #12
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court declined to review Bernard's petition for certiorari.

    Lower Ct: United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
    Case Numbers: (18-70008)
    Decision Date: September 14, 2018

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/search....c/18-6992.html

  3. #13
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Execution Scheduled for Codefendant

    Department of Justice
    Office of Public Affairs

    Christopher Andre Vialva murdered youth ministers Todd and Stacie Bagley in 1999. While stopping to use a payphone in Killeen, Texas, Todd Bagley agreed to give a ride to Vialva and two of his accomplices. In the victims’ car, Vialva pulled out a gun, forced the Bagleys into the trunk, and drove the vehicle for several hours, stopping at ATMs to withdraw money from the couple’s bank account and trying to pawn Stacie Bagley’s wedding ring. While locked in the trunk, the couple spoke with their abductors about God and pleaded for their lives. Vialva eventually parked at a remote site on the Fort Hood, Texas, military reservation, where an accomplice doused the car with lighter fluid as the couple sang and prayed. Vialva then shot Todd Bagley in the head, killing him instantly, and shot Stacie Bagley in the face, knocking her unconscious and leaving her to die of smoke inhalation after an accomplice set the car on fire.

    In June 2000, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas found Vialva guilty of, among other offenses, two counts of murder within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States and unanimously recommended two death sentences. His convictions and sentences were affirmed on appeal, and his requests for collateral relief were rejected by every court that considered them. Vialva’s execution is scheduled for Sept. 24, 2020.

    https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/execu...ederal-inmates
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  4. #14
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    The Fifth Circuit has denied Bernard’s motion to file a successive habeas petition.

    https://law.justia.com/cases/federal...020-09-10.html
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  5. #15
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    The panel was made up of Senior Judge Higginbotham (Reagan), Judge Jones (Reagan) and Judge Dennis (Clinton).

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    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    As part of revived federal death penalty, Christopher Vialva executed for Texas double murder

    Vialva was the seventh man executed in the federal execution chamber this year after a 17-year hiatus of the federal death penalty. Texas, meanwhile, is expected to have a comparatively low number of state executions this year because of the pandemic

    The U.S. government executed Christopher Andre Vialva on Thursday night for a 1999 Texas double murder.

    Vialva’s death was scheduled to be the seventh federal execution this year after a push by President Donald Trump’s administration to restart the federal death penalty after a 17-year hiatus. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty nationally in 1976, only three men on federal death row were executed before 2020. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was executed in 2001, and two executions in 2001 and 2003 stemmed from Texas murders.

    Vialva was pronounced dead at 6:46 p.m. Eastern, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. It was the first federal execution for a Texas case this year, and the 40-year-old was the first Black man killed in the 2020 federal executions, which are taking place during a pandemic. In Texas — the state that by far executes the most people — several executions have been taken off the calendar due to the new coronavirus, resulting in what is expected to be the lowest number of state executions in one year in nearly a quarter-century.

    Vialva was convicted in the slaying and robbery of an Iowa couple when he was 19. He and others, including his co-defendant and fellow death row inmate, Brandon Bernard, carjacked Todd and Stacie Bagley on their way home from church, according to court records. The couple was kept in the trunk while the young men tried to pull money from the victims’ bank accounts and pawn a wedding ring. Eventually, Vialva shot both of the victims in the head while they were in the trunk, and Bernard set the car on fire, the records state.

    The crime was deemed a federal crime, not a state one, because the killing occurred on a secluded part of the Fort Hood U.S. Army post in Killeen. This year, Fort Hood has been heavily scrutinized as at least nine soldiers have died in suicides, homicides and accidents.

    The Trump administration aimed to restart federal executions last year, when it set five executions for December 2019 and January 2020 in cases in which men had been convicted of murdering children. The government planned to use pentobarbital, the same lethal drug Texas uses in its routinely held executions. Court fights over the lethal injection procedure and the drug’s potential painful effects delayed the executions, but the first federal execution since 2003 took place in July in Terre Haute, Indiana.

    U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in a 2019 statement that “we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

    Four of the five men scheduled for execution in December and January were executed in July and August, with the exception of Alfred Bourgeois, whose case is paused while courts assess whether he is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution. Bourgeois was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter on the Corpus Christi naval base in 2002. Concerns over the execution of inmates who are potentially intellectually disabled have risen in recent years, and Texas has been a major player as the Supreme Court has twice slammed its method of determining such a disability. At least seven Texas death row inmates have been resentenced to life in prison since the high court’s first ruling against Texas in 2017.

    In late July, after three federal executions had taken place that month, the Justice Department announced two more scheduled for September unrelated to crimes against children, including Vialva’s. William LeCroy, convicted of the rape and murder of a woman during a Georgia home invasion, was executed Tuesday.

    In a video released this month, Vialva pleaded for a stop to his execution based on what he deemed an unfair appeals process in federal death penalty cases, racial disparities on death row and his young age at the time of his crime.

    “I’m not making this plea as an innocent man, but I am a changed and redeemed man,” Vialva said in a YouTube video, wearing thick-framed glasses, a knitted yarmulke and a prayer shawl over his prison clothes. “I committed a great wrong when I was a lost kid and took two precious lives from this world. … I’m not the stupid kid I was the day I made the most desperate and tragic decision of my life.”

    More than 46% of the 56 people on federal death row are Black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, while Black people make up about 13% of the U.S. population. Texas shows similar disparities, with 44% of 209 death row inmates being Black, while the state’s Black population is about 12%.

    Vialva and his attorneys had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt his execution because of outstanding questions about whether federal executions need to be set by a court or can be set by the U.S. attorney general, as was the case in recent executions. An appeal argued that because Vialva’s case stems from Texas, it should follow the state’s execution-setting rules. Texas executions are set by the trial courts and must be scheduled at least 91 days in advance to allow time for late appeals and petitions for clemency, in which the parole board and governor may decide to delay the execution or reduce a death row inmate’s sentence to life in prison.

    Vialva’s execution date was set by the DOJ, not the federal trial court. The trial court later rejected the argument that it needed to set the date for a federal execution, but out of caution, on Sept. 11 it ordered the Thursday execution. Susan Otto, Vialva’s attorney, said that didn’t meet the 91-day requirement set in Texas. An appeals court also ruled against Vialva. Otto said the concern raised multiple uncertainties on how the federal death penalty is meant to be carried out. She said she didn’t know if Trump “even knows that Mr. Vialva exists.”

    “Instead of [the DOJ] saying, ‘All the appeals have concluded, we request an execution set’ ... we received 55 days notice, if you want to call it notice. It was a letter handed from the warden to Mr. Vialva,” Otto said Wednesday. “This gave us very, very little time to put together our clemency petition.”

    In Texas, there have been three executions at the death chamber in Huntsville this year. All but one scheduled during the pandemic have been taken off the calendar. Since Texas executions need to be scheduled 91 days in advance and the next scheduled date is in January, it is unlikely another will take place this year.

    The last time three or fewer Texas executions took place in a year was in 1996, according to data from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s, 570 people have been executed in Texas.

    https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09...topher-vialva/
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  7. #17
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    Bernard has received an execution date of December 10, 2020

    Execution scheduled for two federal inmates convicted of heinous murders

    Attorney General William P. Barr today directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule the executions of two federal death-row inmates, both of whom were convicted of especially heinous murders at least 13 years ago.

    Lisa Montgomery fatally strangled a pregnant woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, cut open her body, and kidnapped her baby. In December 2004, as part of a premeditated murder-kidnap scheme, Montgomery drove from her home in Kansas to Stinnett’s home in Missouri, purportedly to purchase a puppy. Once inside the residence, Montgomery attacked and strangled Stinnett—who was eight months pregnant—until the victim lost consciousness. Using a kitchen knife, Montgomery then cut into Stinnett’s abdomen, causing her to regain consciousness. A struggle ensued, and Montgomery strangled Stinnett to death. Montgomery then removed the baby from Stinnett’s body, took the baby with her, and attempted to pass it off as her own. Montgomery subsequently confessed to murdering Stinnett and abducting her child. In October 2007, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri found Montgomery guilty of federal kidnapping resulting in death, and unanimously recommended a death sentence, which the court imposed. Her conviction and sentence were affirmed on appeal, and her request for collateral relief was rejected by every court that considered it. Montgomery is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on December 8, 2020, at U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute, Indiana.

    Brandon Bernard and his accomplices brutally murdered two youth ministers, Todd and Stacie Bagley, on a military reservation in 1999. After Todd Bagley agreed to give a ride to several of Bernard’s accomplices, they pointed a gun at him, forced him and Stacie into the trunk of their car, and drove the couple around for hours while attempting to steal their money and pawn Stacie’s wedding ring. While locked in the trunk, the couple spoke with their abductors about God and pleaded for their lives. The abductors eventually parked on the Fort Hood military reservation, where Bernard and another accomplice doused the car with lighter fluid as the couple, still locked in the trunk, sang and prayed. After Stacie said, “Jesus loves you,” and “Jesus, take care of us,” one of the accomplices shot both Todd and Stacie in the head—killing Todd and knocking Stacie unconscious. Bernard then lit the car on fire, killing Stacie through smoke inhalation. In June 2000, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas found Bernard guilty of, among other offenses, two counts of murder within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and unanimously recommended a death sentence. His conviction and sentence were affirmed on appeal, and his request for collateral relief was rejected by every court that considered it. Bernard is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on December 10, 2020, at U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute, Indiana. One of his accomplices, Christopher Vialva, was executed for his role in the Bagleys’ murder on September 22, 2020.

    https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/execu...einous-murders
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails 4FB0BA08-3A0E-4548-9105-50023405143B.jpg  
    Last edited by Bobsicles; 10-16-2020 at 06:26 PM.
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

  8. #18
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    I like how Barr did this. Executing his partner in crime in Sept. and now scheduling an execution for Bernard. This will bring closure to the family.
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

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  9. #19
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Ted's Avatar
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    I wonder if Barr went for Vialva and then Bernard to attract more Christian voters to Trump? Yknow, given the victims were youth ministers.
    Violence and death seem to be the only answers that some people understand.

  10. #20
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Shep3's Avatar
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    Call me naive but I don’t think anything here is politics I think Barr genuinely cares about getting justice and is picking cases he thinks are the most horrific

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