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Texas Death-Row Inmate Napoleon Beazley Granted Stay of Execution
AUSTIN, Texas, Aug 15 (News Agencies) - The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued a stay of execution for 25-year-old Napoleon Beazley, who was scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday for the 1994 murder of a Texas businessman, court officials told news agencies.
Reading from the ruling, the court clerk said Beazley has challenged "the validity of his conviction and resulting sentences," Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
"Upon due consideration, we grant applicant's request for a stay of execution. We take no action on the application," the court said. "Applicant is granted a stay of execution pending further orders by this court."
Beazley had said earlier in a recent death-row interview with AFP that he regarded it as unlikely his execution would be postponed.
He said there was no "one thing" that made him carry out the murder. "The only reason I'm here is because of me," he said.
Beazley was scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. (5 p.m. EST) on Wednesday for the April 1994 murder of John Luttig of Tyler, Texas.
Beazley was 17 years old when he shot Luttig in the head as the man was getting out of his car outside his home. Beazley then stole Luttig's car, with the help of two accomplices, who were both later sentenced to life in prison.
The 63-year-old Luttig was the father of federal appeals court Judge Michael Luttig, who sits on the Richmond, Virginia-based Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Texas had been steeped in controversy as it prepared to execute Beazley, now aged 25, amid charges of unfairness in his trial and protests from abroad that people should not be executed for crimes they committed while they were under the age of 18.
The Council of Europe on Tuesday appealed to Texas Governor Rick Perry to delay the execution, saying it contravened international juridical norms.
The American Bar Association and Amnesty International (AI) had protested it as well.
AI, which works for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty, published a report on July 31st calling for clemency in Beazley's case, saying that Beazley and other child offenders who have been sentenced to death are "too young to serve on a jury, but old enough to be condemned to death by one."
And last week European Parliament president Nicole Fontaine said, in a letter to the governor, that the execution would run counter to U.N. conventions on human rights. "The human conscience is particularly revolted when those executed were minor of age at the time of the crime," she wrote.
A request for a reprieve, which Beazley's lawyers had taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, had been turned down Monday.
Those opposed to the execution further charged that the death penalty was sought against Beazley largely because of the victim's judicial ties, but Texas prosecutors dispute those claims.
"[We sought the death penalty] based on the facts of the crime," said Ed Marty, the assistant district attorney who helped prosecute the case.
Beazley's execution would have marked the 12th carried out in Texas this year. He also would have been the 19th inmate in the United States to be executed for a murder committed while under the age of 18 since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
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