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Politics : Piffer Thread on Political Rantings and Ravings -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jcky who wrote (1129)	6/25/2001 2:07:32 PM
From: Lost1	Respond to of 14610

prepare for an extreme narrowing of the meaning of FREE

To: jcky who wrote (1129)	8/15/2001 5:25:19 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14610

I found this article about the death penalty case in Texas this week to be quite interesting. On the one hand, you have a 17 year old, president of his high school class, a popular athlete, no criminal record. On the other you have an established businessman, driving a Mercedes Benz, father of a prominent federal judge in Texas. The businessman is driving his car. The 17-year old, a jury unanimously decides, murders the businessman in a carjacking. The jury is asked to vote for a death sentence. They do. Unanimously. And yet, on appeal, the media focuses not at all on the crime, it seems. This article never addresses the issue of whether there is any question that the defendant committed the crime. (I haven't followed the case, so I don't have any idea whether he did it or not.) The Supreme Court voted 3-3 on whether to take the case. Three judges couldn't vote because they knew the victim's son. Since four votes are required to take a case, the Court didn't take the case, prompting a media frenzy ("Tie Goes to the Executioner", screamed one headline). Now a Texas state court has stayed the execution anyway, because the "kid" was only 17 when he committed the crime. Whether you are for or against the death penalty, the way it is administered is a mess. Here's the article: dailynews.yahoo.com Wednesday August 15 3:52 PM ET Texas Appeals Court Stays Execution of Teen Killer By Jeff Franks HUNTSVILLE, Texas (Reuters) - The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday issued an emergency stay for a man who committed murder when he was 17, in a case that has renewed international condemnation of capital punishment in the United States and Texas in particular. Napoleon Beazley, now 25, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection shortly after 6 p.m. CDT (7 p.m. EDT) at the state prison in Huntsville, 75 miles north of Houston. The Texas court, which rarely grants stays, decided to consider his lawyers' arguments against the legality of executing someone who committed a crime when he was a minor. Critics ranging from Amnesty International to the European Union (news - web sites) have asked Texas not to kill Beazley. In a recent report, Amnesty International called the United States a ``rogue state'' with regard to capital punishment and said Texas, which leads the nation in executions, was the worst of all. BEAZLEY CONVICTED IN OILMAN'S MURDER Beazley was condemned for shooting oilman John Luttig, 63, to death while stealing his Mercedes Benz in the east Texas town of Tyler on April 19, 1994. Luttig was the father of a well-connected federal judge in Virginia, J. Michael Luttig, which has brought charges that prosecutors sought the death penalty only because of the judge's prominence. They have denied the accusation. The crime shocked Beazley's family and friends because he was a popular athlete and president of his high school class and had no criminal record. But he admitted he had been a small-time crack cocaine dealer. The lawyer who lodged Beazley's initial appeal in 1996 said in an affidavit filed with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Tuesday that he handled it badly because he did not raise the age issue or interview two accomplices in the Luttig murder who have since recanted some of the testimony that helped send Beazley to death row. The lawyer, Robin Norris, admitted he had never filed a death penalty appeal before Beazley's and at that time had taken on too many such cases -- five -- to do them properly, the Houston Chronicle reported. Beazley's current attorney, Walter Long, is also arguing that the jury that condemned the young black man was all-white and included at least one member thought to be a racist. The case caused an unusual split in the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) on Monday when it refused to stay the execution in a 3-3 tie vote. Three of the justices recused themselves because of links to the younger Luttig. TEXAS HAS EXECUTED 250 Texas has executed 250 death-row inmates since resuming capital punishment in 1982 after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a four-year ban on the death penalty. Many of them, including a number of the 151 performed while President Bush (news - web sites) was governor of Texas, have drawn widespread condemnation because of questions about the quality of the justice in the state. Bush, a death penalty supporter, has said many times he believed the people put to death under his administration got ''full and fair access to the courts'' and were guilty as charged. Death penalty opponents have often criticized the state for providing poor legal counsel for impoverished defendants.