Napoleon Beazley
USA (Texas) Napoleon Beazley(m), black, aged 25, was executed in Texas on 28 May 2002 for a murder committed when he was 17 years old. International law prohibits the execution of those who were under 18 at the time of the crime.
In a final written statement, Napoleon Beazley wrote: 'The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless. But the person that committed that act is no longer here - I am. I'm sorry that John Luttig died. And I'm sorry that it was something in me that caused all of this to happen to begin with. Tonight we tell the world that there are no second chances in the eyes of justice. Tonight, we tell our children that in some instances, in some cases, killing is right... No one wins tonight. No one gets closure. No one walks away victorious'.
A few hours before the execution, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles (BPP) announced that they had voted 10-7 against clemency. Governor Rick Perry refused to intervene, stating: 'To delay his punishment would be to delay justice'.
It is believed that tens of thousands of people in the USA and around the world appealed to the Texas authorities to spare Napoleon Beazley's life. A single website in a Swedish national newspaper, for example, raised more than 13,000 appeals for commutation in an online petition, which Amnesty International Sweden then arranged to be handed over to the BPP. Among the individuals who have appealed for clemency in this case are the District Attorney from Napoleon Beazley's home county, a former warden of Texas death row, and the judge who oversaw Napoleon Beazley's trial.
US organizations which appealed for clemency included the American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, the Child Welfare League of America, the Children's Defense Fund, The Constitution Project, the Juvenile Law Center, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, and the Youth Law Center.
Internationally, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Swiss and Mexican governments, the Law Society of England and Wales, and the Canadian Bar Association are among those to have called for the execution to be halted.
Six Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa called for clemency. In a six-page letter to the BPP, Archbishop Tutu wrote: 'I am astounded that Texas and a few other states in the United States take children from their families and execute them...The State forces the innocent family to atone for the death of the victim by causing it unbearable grief...As a pastor, I ask this Board to join in the world unity protecting the rights of children... Spare the child. Spare the family.
Spare the community. Spare us all the degradation of the death of another child offender, when by opening the hope of a future for him and his family, you give hope to us all... I humbly plead with you to spare the life of Napoleon Beazley, the integrity of his family, and the hope of his community for a more just society'.
One of the seven Board members who voted for clemency, when told of the execution, said: 'I'm really apprehensive that this is a day we're going to be sorry about for a long time. I just feel like something really wrong has happened.'
Napoleon Beazley becomes the 10th child offender to be executed in the USA since 1995. Six of them were killed in Texas. In the same period, seven child offenders were reported to have been executed in the rest of the world combined, three in Iran, two in Pakistan, one in Democratic Republic of Congo, and one in Nigeria. Last year, President Musharraf of Pakistan announced that he would commute the death sentences of all child offenders in Pakistan.
Napoleon Beazley was the 30th person to be executed in the USA this year, and the 779th since judicial killing resumed there in 1977. Texas accounts for 270 of these executions.
Napoleon Beazley's lawyer had appealed for a stay of execution-in the courts and to the Governor of Texas-pending an imminent ruling by the US Supreme Court on whether 'standards of decency' in the USA have evolved to the extent that executing people with mental retardation is now unconstitutional. If the Court rules that such a national consensus has emerged, it could undermine its 1989 decision allowing child offenders to be put to death and lead to a ruling that a national consensus also exists against the execution of child offenders.
Shortly before Napoleon Beazley was killed, the Missouri Supreme Court stayed the execution of Christopher Simmons, which had been set for next week. Simmons, like Beazley, was sentenced to death for a crime committed when he was 17. The Missouri court issued the stay pending the Supreme Court decision on the mental retardation issue, on the same argument raised by Napoleon Beazley's lawyer. The Missouri Supreme Court evidently believes there is merit to the argument, whereas the Texas courts and governor refused to countenance a delay in Napoleon Beazley's execution. It was a brutally stark reminder of the arbitrariness of the death penalty.
Those who wish may send a letter protesting Governor Perry's failure to intervene to stop this internationally illegal execution.
Governor Rick Perry
c/o Bill Jones, General Counsel
PO Box 12428, Austin, Texas 78711
Fax 1 512 463 1932 (General Counsel's Fax), or 463 1849 (Governor's fax)
Salutation: Dear Governor
For more information, see:
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Too young to vote, old enough to be executed, AMR 51/105/2001, July 2001;
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Hypocrisy or human rights? Time to choose, AMR 51/075/2002, 15 May 2002; and
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Killing hope, confirming hypocrisy - Texas executes another child offender, AMR 51/082/2002, 29 May 2002.
Many thanks to all who have sent appeals on behalf of Napoleon Beazley.
Amnesty International is a worldwide grassroots movement that promotes and defends human rights.
Urgent Action Network
Amnesty International USA
PO Box 1270
Nederland CO 80466-1270
Email: uan@aiusa.org
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Beazley should have been granted reprieve.
Napoleon Beazley was executed May 28 for the killing of a Tyler businessman in 1994. Beazley was 17 when he committed the crime. This column was written by Walter Long, who, along with David Botsford, represented Beazley during his trial.
In 1993, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun remarked, "I have voiced disappointment with this Court's obvious eagerness to do away with any restriction on the State's power to execute whomever and however they please. I have also expressed doubts about whether, in the absence of such restrictions, capital punishment remains constitutional at all. Of one thing, however, I am certain. Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder."
Our client Napoleon Beazley was not innocent of capital murder. Yet, in my opinion, his execution May 28 may have been perilously close to simple murder. The "safeguards" in Napoleon's case were completely unacceptable.
As in the cases of scores of other indigent Texas capital inmates, the state denied Napoleon any meaningful appellate review of his death sentence by failing to provide him with statutorily guaranteed competent representation at the only time in which he could reasonably hope for an evidentiary hearing, an opportunity to develop non-record facts, and a credibility determination made by a judge hearing testimony on both sides of the issues.
What is more frightening and unique about Napoleon's case is that, as a child offender, he may have been protected from execution by the federal constitution, as well as by international law. This month, the U.S. Supreme Court should issue a decision in Atkins v. Virginia that may undermine the legal rule in Stanford v. Kentucky, the 1989 Supreme Court case which allows the death penalty to be given to 17-year-old offenders like Napoleon.
Application of the new Atkins rule to the facts regarding juvenile offenders may exempt them from execution.
My reprieve petition to Gov. Rick Perry reiterated what I had been asking every adjudicator to do for Napoleon since February: grant a reprieve until Atkins is released. I explained that it was nearly impossible for the United States Supreme Court to grant review in Napoleon's case because only six justices were participating, and no other juvenile offender (who could have had nine justices) had a case before the court to which Napoleon's could be attached. In that regard, I noted, "By chance circumstances, Christopher Simmons, a child offender in Missouri, had his execution date changed from May 1 to June 5 by the Missouri Supreme Court, which currently has the Eighth Amendment claim before it. He is the next child offender who will have all 9 justices . . . . The answers to all of these questions may be given in Simmons' case, but only days too late to help Napoleon if a reprieve is not granted."
I was on my way to Huntsville around 2:30 p.m. on May 28 when I received a call from Simmons' attorney on my cell phone, notifying me that minutes earlier the Missouri Supreme Court had issued an indefinite stay for Simmons. The order read, "Execution stayed pending decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Atkins v. Commonwealth of Virginia."
I headed back to Austin, where I met with the governor's deputy counsel, making sure that the governor understood why I believed the Supreme Court had not acted in our case and that we were asking him to do exactly what Missouri did. David Botsford and I filed a motion for stay of execution at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which has the jurisdiction to stay an execution for any reason.
The court voted 5-3 to deny a stay. Judges Tom Price, Cheryl Johnson, and Lawrence Meyers noted that they would have granted a stay. Shortly after getting word of the court's decision, I received a call from the governor's office: The governor had denied the reprieve.
Our client was not innocent of the offense, but may have been ineligible for the death penalty under the federal Constitution. By denying a 30-day reprieve, the governor displayed a disregard for fairness, especially in light of his awareness of Missouri's just and equitable stay on the same day. Perry understood the stakes when he made his decision. Waiting another month to execute Napoleon would not have hurt the system. On the other hand, if Atkins leads to protection for juvenile offenders, Perry's decision will expose the system's brutal arbitrariness.
(source: Walter Long, Opinion, Austin American-Statesman)
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TEXAS:
Why does success bug us?
Napoleon Beasley is dead and buried now. Public attention has moved on. But I can't shake the feeling that we missed the real issue in that tragic story.
Mr. Beazley was executed 12 days ago for killing a Tyler man during a carjacking in 1994. Mr. Beazley was 17 at the time, and world attention focused for a few days on whether capital punishment is proper for someone so young.
That's worth debating, I'm sure. But there's another part of Napoleon Beasley's story that gnaws at me more. And that's the way his culture failed him. We can debate how society at large should have punished him. But a more urgent matter is how his immediate society helped destroy him.
This is a little risky to talk about. It touches on race, and that can be precarious. But let me make clear that this subject transcends race. It's about the whole human race.
A sad part of the human condition is that we don't always celebrate success
in others. Worse, we sometimes work to tear others down. And that's a painful part of Mr. Beasley's story that we ought to face. It has been on my mind since reading a potent story about him in the April issue of Texas Monthly.
By any measure, Mr. Beazley was a success. In the small East Texas town of Grapeland, he was a big deal. President of his senior class. Runner-up for Mr. Grapeland High School. Star athlete. Honor student. College-bound. Napoleon Beazley was also black. And that became a terrible burden for him. But not in the way we usually discuss. "I've felt more racism from blacks than I could ever experience from whites," he said from death row in the magazine article. "Because some of my friends were white, I was ridiculed. Because I dated white girls, I was ridiculed. Not by white people-black people."
For his success, Mr. Beazley was mocked within his own culture. His older sister explained, "Among the people we grew up with, Napoleon wasn't liked. There was a certain way you were supposed to be, and he wasn't that way. Other kids would say to him ... 'You think you're white.'"
It tormented Mr. Beazley. "I wanted to be black," he said. And increasingly there was only one place he felt authentic and accepted. That was hanging out with his cousin Timmy, who was dealing drugs and living large. Mr. Beazley began to secretly spend more time with new friends, those living out the celebrated gangster life. And one night, their adventures took them in search of a car to steal. You know the rest.
Mr. Beasley couldn't explain why he pulled the trigger that night. Nor did he offer any excuses. "I don't blame anybody for what happened but me," he told the magazine interviewer.
But it's not making excuses to see that something perverse in human nature resented Mr. Beasley's success. Something needed to drag him down to the worst in himself.
It's not just black culture. It's in all of us. Civil rights leader José Angel Gutierrez wrote years ago that the Anglo establishment actually counted on Latinos to undermine each other: "A standard South Texas joke tells about the fisherman who walks away from a freshly caught basket of crabs. A passer-by yells to him that his catch will soon get away. 'Don't worry,' the fisherman replies. 'They're Mexican crabs. They'll pull each other down.'"
Criticism of a recent column stung because it accused me of doing this very thing. I had poked fun at college dissertations and their highfalutin titles. Several readers shamed me for mocking education, for belittling those who are intelligent and are striving to learn. Did I do that? Not consciously. But maybe that was a dark strain of the humor in that column.
Yes, we can go on debating proper punishment for young offenders. Or we can confront that thing in our cultures, in ourselves, that resents success and secretly celebrates a fall.
(source: Steve Blow, Column, Dallas Morning News
