Two Black Men Have Been Executed In Two Days, Two More Set To Die

A second inmate was executed in as many days, with three more executions scheduled before Inauguration Day. Of the five executions scheduled to take place since Election Day, four of them are Black men.

Before Donald Trump ordered executions to resume this summer, there was a 17-year hiatus of federal executions. This string of executions breaks with a 130-year precedent of not carrying out any federal executions during a presidential transition. Trump is set to oversee the most executions by a United States president in more than 100 years.

“Once the Supreme Court ruled in favor of resuming executions, the Department has proceeded each month — with the exception of October — since July 2020,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice told CNN.

Alfred Bourgeois was put to death on Friday at the Terre Haute federal prison, just 24-hours after Brandon Bernard was executed. Bourgeois was convicted for the murder of his 2-year-old daughter and sentenced to die in 2004. Bernard was convicted of murder when he was 18-years-old for the death of two youth ministers. Both committed crimes on federal land, making them eligible to be punished at the federal level.

In the final days of Trump’s presidency, two more Black men are scheduled to die, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to do away with the federal death penalty. He plans to push states to refrain from seeking the death penalty. Although there is no evidence that a federal death row inmate has been wrongfully convicted, Biden’s push to do away with the practice stems from the amount of wrongfully convicted people who have been sentenced to die on the state level. According to CNN, 172 men and women who were sentenced to die were found to be wrongfully convicted. Of those exonerees, 89 Black men, 63 White men, 15 Latino men, one Native American man, two men of another race were wrongfully convicted. One Black woman and one White woman are also included in the statistic.

Texas routinely leads the country with the most executions. The state has carried out 570 convictions since 1976. Since 2015, more than 70% of Texas death sentences have been imposed on people of color. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice states that of the 210 inmates currently sitting on death row in the state, 93 are Black, 57 are White, 54 are Hispanic, and six identify as other.