Federal death row inmate Brandon Bernard was put to death late Thursday night after his legal team exhausted all options to halt the execution. The timing of his execution and whether he should have been executed at all have been heavily debated. Many are questioning why the Trump administration has suddenly decided to carry out several executions before the president’s term expires on January 20th. This is reportedly the first time a lame-duck president has carried out a series of executions like this in the last 130 years.

Bernard was sentenced to death more than 20 years ago. CBS explains:

In 1999, when Bernard was 18, he and his co-conspirators robbed and abducted Todd and Stacie Bagley, two youth ministers, on a Texas military reservation. The couple was then locked in the trunk of their car, when Bernard’s accomplice, Christopher Vialva, shot both victims in the head, killing Todd instantly. Bernard then set fire to the trunk. 

While Bernard set the car on fire, his defense team maintains the couple was already dead at the hands of Vialva and that as a lower gang member Bernard was just following orders when he was told to burn the car. The AP says “Bernard, who received a lethal injection of phenobarbital at a U.S. prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, was a rare execution of a person who was in his teens when his crime was committed.”

Several high-profile people have been pleading Bernard’s case over the last couple of weeks including Kim Kardashian West.

West and others had pleaded with Trump to commute Bernard’s sentence to life in prison. CBS adds:

Bernard’s defense team had made a last-minute attempt to halt the execution by requesting an emergency stay of execution from the Supreme Court and adding Harvard Law school professor Alan Dershowitz and former independent counsel Ken Starr to the defense team. The court denied that stay on Thursday night. 

In a statement issued before Bernard’s death, his attorney called his execution “a stain on America’s criminal justice system.”

The AP’s Michael Tarm, who witnessed the execution wrote, “Brandon Bernard was amazingly at ease for someone who knew he was about to die. If he felt fear, I saw no sign of it. He looked around curiously and calmly, even when an official got off the death-chamber phone and said that “the execution could proceed.”