Revenge Will Never Be Justice

Brandon Bernard’s execution reveals a broken justice system that prioritizes destruction over reform

Published in

The Bigger Picture

7 min readDec 15, 2020

Brandon and his daughter (Credit/The Sun)

On December 10, 2020, otherwise known as International Human Rights Day, Brandon Bernard was executed by the United States federal government for being an accomplice to a murder when he was eighteen years old. New evidence suggests that his victim, Stacie Bagley, was already dead by a gunshot from the lead perpetrator when Bernard set the car on fire. Despite the new evidence, the Supreme Court denied an appeal to delay his execution. They held true to their promise of executing him on a day reserved for pushing forward human rights legislation.

Though 106 countries have outlawed the death penalty, the United States has yet to do so, joining the ranks of the most notorious human rights offenders, such as North Korea and Iran. In fact, the current presidential administration is moving forward with the most executions during a lame duck period in history without any remorse.

What comes to mind when you think of a human rights violation?

Images of North Korea’s prison labor camps or violent bombings in Iran come to mind for most people.

One would never imagine that in the United States, one of the most developed countries in the world, there would be atrocities similar in scale.

It would hesitate you to think that since 1972, 7,800 people have been sentenced to death, and 1,500 people have been executed in the United States. Many of these individuals are severely mentally ill, such as Lisa Montgomery; poor people of color comprise an even larger proportion of death row inmates.

Make no mistake, the crimes that these individuals commit are horrible, and they do deserve punishment for tearing the lives of their victims and their families apart. However, when our criminal justice system is so focused on destroying rather than reforming, we have failed as a nation. We have failed to address the root causes of criminal behavior, many of which are systemic. We have failed to bring light to our nation by fighting darkness with only more darkness.

An ineffective deterrent to crime

Many advocates for the death penalty argue that it serves as a good deterrent for violent crime. After all, what can be worse than the punishment of death, they argue. The problem with this statement is that it assumes that criminal behavior is always rationally motivated: before committing a crime, a criminal carefully weighs the benefits against the consequences. It fails to consider that many criminals simply act based on their emotions; crimes of passion such as the murder of Steve McNair were motivated by sudden rage. There have also been numerous cases where the perpetrator was impaired by drugs or alcohol, Dale Nelson being one of them. This statement also makes the bold assumption that criminals know the specific penalties for crimes in their locations, which is unfair to assume since they are not common knowledge for people outside of law.

The statistics also show that the death penalty has failed to reduce violent crime; in 2018, the violent crime rate was 30% lower in non-death penalty states than in states with the death penalty. In fact, the South consistently has the highest murder rate yet carries out 80% of executions in the United States.

Most importantly, the death penalty does not deter crime because it does not address some of the root issues that cause crime. Poverty has long been a contributing factor to crime; in desperate need of basic necessities such as food and housing, some unfortunately turn toward theft. The education disparity between wealthy and impoverished cities is massive in the United States, as school districts with the highest levels of poverty receive significantly less funding per capita than school districts with the lowest levels of poverty. The lack of adequate education in poor neighborhoods perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Without a proper education, many youth fail to find jobs that pay a decent living wage. The hopelessness that results from poverty may put these youth at a higher risk for drug abuse and gang membership. Instead of being so focused on gaining vengeance after the fact, our government should focus more on tackling the complex systemic issues that lead one down a path of crime.

An irreversible mistake

The death penalty is alarmingly erroneous: since 1973, 173 people have been exonerated from death row. To put this number in perspective, for every nine people who are executed, one person is exonerated. With the passage of time, new technology and testimony may change verdicts of cases that were decided decades ago. Eyewitness identifications can be misleading or even intentionally false. Given that there is a non-negligible margin of error in criminal cases, especially those from the pre-DNA testing era, the death penalty is too big of a gamble. It is not gambling with money but with a person’s life.

Not for the “worst of the worst” but biased towards poor minorities

It is commonly assumed that the death penalty is reserved for the “worst of the worst” in our society, i.e. serial killers or domestic terrorists. However, our current justice system does not always give punishment proportional to the crime; if that were the case, Brandon Bernard’s life would have been spared, but mass murderers such as Dylann Roof and Gary Ridgway would have been executed. Instead, our justice system is designed to favor the wealthy and neglect the poor, especially poor people of color. Wealthy individuals can afford high profile defense attorneys who can increase their chances of winning cases. They can also afford to keep fighting battles in court, as witnessed by Cal Harris, a multimillionaire who appealed his murder conviction four times in court. Racial bias is evident in death penalty cases, as Black individuals comprise 34% of people on death row, but only 15% of the general population. Even though only 50% of murder victims are White, more than 75% of murder victims in death penalty cases are White. In Washington, jurors are over three times as likely to recommend a death penalty sentence for Black defendants rather than White defendants. These statistics show that the decision to put someone on death row is not always colorblind: stereotypes do influence jurors’ decisions.

An outright violation of the Eighth Amendment

The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution states that “cruel and unusual punishment” should not be inflicted upon any person. Though the United States has moved past the days of public executions by gallows, the current method of lethal injection is far from humane. New medical studies have found froth in the airways of prisoners executed by legal injection, which suggests that they were still alive when their lungs filled with fluid. The pain of lethal injection has been compared to “waterboarding” and “being buried alive while feeling fire in your veins.” Given that prisoners can consciously feel the immense pain of their impending death, lethal injection is no less cruel than outdated methods.

Ignores people’s potential for change

The motivation for the death penalty stems from the premise that all criminals are irredeemable. This premise ignores the possibility of people changing their worldviews over time. Human behavior and values are not fixed in stone: rather, they continuously evolve in response to different life experiences. Though Brandon Bernard recklessly acted as an accomplice to a murder as part of a gang in his youth, he has dramatically improved his behavior over time in prison. His deep regret over his involvement in the murder has motivated him to counsel at-risk teens to prevent them from being swayed by bad influences. He had no serious behavioral violations in prison and had genuine remorse for his wrongdoings, both of which suggest that he had learned to change his ways.

Though common knowledge suggests that the brain is fully developed at age 18, recent neurological studies have concluded that the male brain, especially the decision-making portion, does not completely mature until about the age of 25. Those who knew Brandon well have noted that he was vulnerable to being influenced by peer pressure from poor influences.

Perpetuating an endless cycle of bloodshed

Defendants of the death penalty argue that life in prison diminishes the tragedy of the crime. Advocating against the death penalty does not diminish the worth of the victims. Stacie Bagley, a youth pastor, met such a horrendous and untimely fate; she and countless other murder victims had the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the world stolen from them too soon. I do not advocate for participants of such violent crimes to be let out free.

Rather, we question if it is within our power to fight suffering with more suffering. With each execution, we must ask, what have we achieved? Were we able to bring back the dead victims? Were we able to add closure by creating more suffering? Were we able to teach the perpetrator, who is now dead, a lesson? We don’t achieve anything. In fact, we have sank down to the level of the murderer when we execute one of our own. We may think that we have won a “war” against the evil, but the truth is we have all sinned. People aren’t divided into two groups of all “good” and all “evil.” It is an arbitrary division we have created to justify a deeply barbaric act.