12 December 2020 :
Alfred Bourgeois, 56, Black, was executed. He was pronounced dead at 8:21 p.m. Eastern time after receiving a lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The man was sentenced to death on March 24, 2004 in Texas for the June 28, 2002 killing of his 2 and a half-year-old daughter.
In his last words, Bourgeois offered no apology and instead struck a deeply defiant tone, insisting that he neither killed nor sexually abused his baby girl, according to a report from the journalist present.
"I ask God to forgive all those who plotted and schemed against me, and planted false evidence," he said, according to the report, adding, "I did not commit this crime."
Alfred Bourgeois abused, tortured and beat his young daughter.
According to the Department of Justice, after a paternity test identified Bourgeois as the father of a 2 1/2-year-old girl and a court-ordered that he pay child support to the mother, Bourgeois took temporary custody of his daughter and brought her with him on a trucking route. While on the trip, Bourgeois systematically abused and tortured her — including by punching her in the face, whipping her with an electrical cord and burning the bottom of her foot with a cigarette lighter.
In July 2002, Bourgeois arrived at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station for a delivery. While backing his truck up to a loading dock, his daughter tipped over her training potty. Bourgeois became enraged and repeatedly slammed the back of her head into the truck’s window and dashboard, killing her.
On March 16, 2004, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas found Bourgeois guilty of murder within the special territorial jurisdiction of the United States, and unanimously recommended a death sentence, which the court imposed on March 24 (see HoC).
His lawyers argued Bourgeois argued had an IQ that puts him in the intellectually disabled category, saying that should have made him ineligible for the death penalty under federal law. Victor J. Abreu, said it was “shameful” to execute his client “without fair consideration of his intellectual disability.”
Bourgeois becomes the 10th person executed this year by the federal system, the 13th person executed by the federal government since it resumed executions in 2001, the 17th person executed this year in the United States, and the 1,529 since the United States reintroduced the death penalty in 1976 and resumed executions in 1977. He also is, after Orlando Hall, the third man executed during the “lame-duck administration”.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/next-to-die/fe/4pyw4sgm
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/11/politics/alfred-bourgeois-execution/index.html
