Tutu joins call to stop execution
Posted on 05/18/2002 10:53:32 AM PDT by MeekOneGOP
Tutu joins call to stop execution
05/18/2002
Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu and American Bar Association President Robert Hirshon have written Texas officials to oppose the execution of Texas death row inmate Napoleon Beazley.
Mr. Beazley, 25, is scheduled to die by injection on May 28 for the 1994 murder of Tyler oilman John Luttig, 63, during a botched carjacking. Mr. Beazley was 17 at the time, and his case has attracted national and international attention because of his age.
"I find it incomprehensible that the death penalty should be imposed upon a person who was a child when the offense occurred," Archbishop Tutu, who served as chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, wrote in a letter dated May 16.
In a May 14 letter, Mr. Hirshon, who heads the United States' largest legal professional association, voiced his "strong opposition" to executing Mr. Beazley.
Others groups, including the European Union and Amnesty International, also have publicly opposed Mr. Beazley's execution recently.
Smith County Assistant District Attorney Edward Marty, who has opposed Mr. Beazley's appeals, said Friday that he is not swayed by pleas on Mr. Beazley's behalf.
Mr. Beazley, he said, committed a horrific crime. A Smith County jury weighed the evidence before convicting him and handing down a death sentence. And, Mr. Marty said, Texas law permits a defendant who is 17 at the time of the offense to receive a death sentence.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted Mr. Beazley a stay of execution last August, just hours before he was to die.
That reprieve came three days after efforts by his attorneys to seek a reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court failed. Three justices had abstained because they knew Mr. Luttig's son, a federal appeals court judge who once served as a Supreme Court law clerk, and the remaining justices deadlocked 3-3.
Last month, a new execution date was set by State District Judge Cynthia Kent, who had sent a letter to Gov. Rick Perry last August asking that Mr. Beazley's sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.
Archbishop Tutu, contacted by phone on Friday, said the case reflects disturbing racial undertones. "There is an unease in this country about the fact that African-Americans disproportionately are represented on death row," he said.
He said that he hoped "good sense will prevail" in Mr. Beazley's case.
E-mail etimms@dallasnews.com
Race of victim: white.
HATE CRIME!!!!
I find it very interesting that Tutu is so much into the Leftwing loop, that he has used the current "Newspeak" for American Negroes. "African-American" was not a term in use in South Africa in the past. It has been picked up from our side of the Atlantic, and is really terribly non-descriptive from a South African perspective, where African heritage would be understood to include a very, very wide variety of races.
He is apparently using it to connote any non-White American with some ancestry from the African Continent. (Note that American Negroes came almost entirely from West Africa and, while Anthropologically linked with the South African Bantu as part of the Negroid branch of the Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid divisions of the bulk of mankind--for the moment leaving out the races in outlying areas--they are also quite different.) Bishop Tutu really has no proper horse in this race, even if ancestral connections in a country of origin were somehow deemed to be relevant to whom Texas punishes for the murder of her citizens.
Of course, ancestral connections have never been deemed relevant in such a situation, to most people. Can you imagine the reaction if Great Britain tried to intervene in our Criminal Justice system on behalf of someone, whose ancestors were transported here in 1733?
As for the American Bar Association. They moved dramatically to the Left in the 1960s and have yet to rebound. They were, believe it or not, a bastion of Conservatism in the 1950s. That is an old and very sad story, when they turned against our Constitutional traditions.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Exactly! I have a feeling, though, that until the SCOTUS rules on the Virginia case, the will be a drought of
executions on Texas Death Row. So far, there have been three held up. Must be some sort of recent record
maybe? (I think three in May is correct)........
(Like D.B. said: "The heat goes on.")
There is an unease in THIS country that blacks commit a disproportional amount of the crime.
We know what Bush would have done, let us see what Perry does.
The shift to marxism in the general population of college educated citizens is prety well complete. There seems to be a rather small percentasge of college graduates who have resisted the marxist indoctrination that comes with a college degree. It's my experience that the higher the degree attained, the more complete the indoctrination.
True, 17 is not the age of a child. Desmond Tutu would be better off commenting on his own rotten, communist country where carjackings and murders are commonplace occurrences. Tutu can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. We have our own domestic communists to deal with and don't need any African communists to tell us what to do.
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