Bourgeois was convicted of the murder of his toddler daughter Jakaren Harrison (nicknamed JaJa), whom he sexually assaulted for weeks and finally killed inside his truck in June 2002.

Bourgeois was found guilty and sentenced to death by a federal jury in March 2004, since his crime took place on a military base in Texas where he was making a delivery.

He often physically assaulted the child, using various objects like electrical cords, a shoe, a plastic bat, and a belt to beat Harrison.

[3] On the day in question, Bourgeois was driving from Louisiana to Texas to make a delivery at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, and Harrison was in the truck with him at the time.

This enraged Bourgeois so much that he grabbed Harrison inside the truck by her shoulders and slammed her head on the windows and dashboard four times, and even raped her.

[21] However, this move attracted criticism from opponents of capital punishment, one of whom stated that the federal death penalty was "arbitrary, racially biased, and rife with poor lawyering and junk science", and there were calls for the upcoming executions of Bourgeois and the other four to be delayed in favor of a review of the law.

[24] The legal representatives of the government appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to overturn the injunction filed by Bourgeois and the other three plaintiffs and sent the case back to the D.C.

[37][38] On December 11, 2020, more than 18 years after murdering two-year-old Jakaren Harrison, 56-year-old Alfred Bourgeois was formally put to death by lethal injection at USP Terre Haute.

He stated he forgave all those who plotted and schemed against him, and planted false evidence to frame him for the murder, and he was pronounced dead about 20 minutes after being administered with a single dose of pentobarbital.

[46][47] The executions of Bourgeois and Bernard, who were both African-American, also sparked outrage among the opponents of capital punishment due to the alleged disproportionality of the death penalty, which was reportedly found to have affected a larger number of African Americans than that of white people.

It also came to attention that another two African-American men, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs, who were both convicted of murder, were scheduled for execution in January 2021.

[50][51] Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion writer of The New York Times and one of the journalists who witnessed the execution, recounted that while she opposed the death penalty and found no justifiable purpose in it, she herself considered the murder of Harrison as "cruel, senseless, depraved" and she could feel how "vivid, palpable, fleshly" the suffering which Harrison underwent during the final six weeks of her life before she met an untimely end.

[3] Legal analyst Elliot Williams also stated that the federal death penalty should be permanently removed as it was an act of vengeance but not justice.

It was speculated that the recent executions of Bourgeois and Bernard were likely the reason for COVID-19 to spread rapidly among the death row population of USP Terre Haute.