South Dakota executes the murderer Rodney Berget after SCOTUS cleared the way.

Berget was sentenced to death for the murder of Correctional Officer Ron RJ Johnson in 2011 during a failed escape attempt. Berget was serving a life sentence for attempted murder and kidnapping.

The execution took place after six years of court delays and debates over his intellectual abilities, and five hours late Monday.

"The execution of inmate Rodney Berget was carried out in accordance with state law," said DOC spokesman, Michael Winder, at 8:10 pm.

"He (Berget) chose to be mean," said Ronald Johnson's daughter. "We chose to be better as a family."

The other inmate who tried to escape the prison, Eric Robert, was executed in 2012 after pleading guilty to the murder. Michael Nordman was sentenced to life in prison for providing the plastic wrap and pipe used in the murder.

A little after 18:30 CT, the US Supreme Court has paved the way for the lethal injection of Berget, 56, after seven years on the death row of the state. While the Attorney General of South Dakota, Marty Jackley, was awaiting the decision of the Supreme Court, that of Berget was fixed at 13:30. the time of execution came and went.

The execution, the state's fourth since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1979, will take place Monday night, Jackley said.

In a Tennessee case, a federal judge said Monday that the state could not execute Edmund Zagorski as scheduled Thursday, unless the prison authorities grant his lawyer access to a phone during the last minutes of his life so that the lawyer can call a judge if something goes wrong during the trial. lethal injection.

In the South Dakota case, Chicago lawyer Juliet Yackel claimed that Mr. Berget was mentally handicapped. The state Supreme Court had previously rejected a petition from Yackel in which he claimed that Berget lacked the intellectual capacity to receive the death sentence.

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Berget, the second-in-law family member to be sentenced to death, filed an affidavit this weekend in which he told Yackel not to appeal.

His affidavit indicated that he did not want to dispute his execution and that he had refused Yackel's October 2 visit. In 2000, Berget's older brother, Roger, was executed in Oklahoma after being convicted in 1987 of killing a man to steal his car.

People gather on October 29, 2018 in front of the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls to remember the murdered prison guard, Ron "RJ" Johnson, before his 56-year-old assassin, Rodney Berget. , be executed. (Photo: Briana Sanchez, (Head of Sioux Falls Argus, S.D.))

Yackel has extensive experience as a defense attorney in death penalty cases. She represented Indiana's ex-death row inmate, Darnell Williams, who was granted a stay of execution in a nationally important case in 2003 and whose sentence was later commuted to a life sentence. in perpetuity with no possibility of parole.

In his response to the opposition brief, Yackel argued that the trial court's decision on Berget's mental capacity was "fundamentally flawed" by failing to respect the previous precedents and that Berget's attorney "had abandoned his ethical obligations as a lawyer". She added that Berget "does not have the ability to represent himself".

The Bergets are not the first brothers and sisters to be convicted. In at least three cases, brothers who conspired to commit crimes were sentenced to death. But Rodney and Roger Berget are distinguished by the fact that their crimes were separated by more than 100 km and 25 years.

"Doing it in different states and in different crimes is kind of a comment on the family," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Information Center on the Death Penalty, which tracks the evolution of the death penalty, in 2012.

The young Berget spent months with his co-detainee Eric Robert on a plan to kill a prison guard so that he could escape or die trying. They would trap a solitary guard and hit him with a pipe before covering his face with a plastic wrap.

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Once the guard was dead, Robert donned the uniform of the deceased and pushed a box in which Berget was standing while the prison gates were opening for daily delivery. Both would slide through the walls without being noticed.

Ron "RJ" Johnson became this lone target on April 12, 2011, at the age of 63. His attackers managed to cross a door before another guard stopped them.

Subsequently, in a statement to a judge, Rodney acknowledged that he deserved to die.

"I knew what I was doing and I kept doing it," said Berget in 2011. "I destroyed a family." I brought a father, a husband, a grandfather Father."

Monday outside the state penitentiary, the delay in execution has aroused mixed reactions. Protesters sentenced to death saw signs of hope as supporters of capital punishment bristled during legal maneuvers.

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"Incredible," shouted a supporter of Berget's execution as another supporter held his cell phone in hand, telling him that the execution was suspended.

With Johnson's flags and buttons, supporters, mostly Johnson family friends, nervously roamed the front yard of the prison, frustrated by seven years of delay.

On the other hand, more than 30 protesters came forward to make a statement against what would be the 19th execution in the history of South Dakota. Robert, an accomplice of Berget, was executed in 2012, a few weeks before the last execution before the last execution, Monday.

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Jessie Tewinkel, a niece of Johnson, a volunteer in a prison for 35 years and sentenced to the execution of Robert, said that her uncle had been murdered, but that she still did not support the sentence of death.

"I think South Dakota is going the wrong way," she said.