Tainted Justice

By BOB HERBERT

 Texas has always had a brutally peculiar take on what constitutes justice. A veteran Dallas defense lawyer, reminiscing last year, said, "At one point, with a black-on-black murder, you could get it dismissed if the defendant would pay funeral expenses."

 A prominent judge, looking back to his days as a prosecutor in the 1950's, remembered an angry boss telling him, "If you ever put another nigger on a jury, you're fired."

 A judge in Harris County, reacting to complaints about a defense lawyer sleeping during a capital murder trial, acknowledged that defendants were entitled to a lawyer, but added, "The Constitution doesn't say the lawyer has to be awake."

Those quotes were drawn from a major study last year of the death penalty in Texas. The whole world knows that Texas has a fetish for executing people. Nothing stops the Lone Star Executioner. There may be uncertainty as to guilt. The condemned may be mentally retarded. The defense lawyer may have been drunk or drug-addicted or wildly incompetent. The jury may have been rabidly racist. No matter. The conveyor belt of death in Huntsville, the state's execution headquarters, maintains its steady, mindless pace.

 Napoleon Beazley is to be placed upon that belt next week. The crime he was convicted of was bad enough, for sure. He killed a man in cold blood, shot at the man's wife and stole their car.

 But the death penalty is always problematic. And there are some issues in the Beazley case that are very troubling. The victim's son is a federal judge from Virginia who forged a remarkably close relationship with the prosecution as it built its case for the death of Mr. Beazley.

 All of the jurors, like the prosecutors and the judge, were white. Mr. Beazley is black. One of the jurors was the president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Another juror, when contacted by a defense investigator during the appeals process, was heard to say, "The nigger got what he deserved." That juror's wife gave the defense team an affidavit that said her husband was "racially prejudiced" and that she found it difficult to believe he could have "set his prejudice aside" for Mr. Beazley's trial.

 Mr. Beazley's lawyer, Walter Long, said the juror was an appliance repairman who, according to a co-worker, would refuse to work on appliances brought in by black customers.

 It's hard to imagine how a fair trial could have been harvested from such bitterly racist soil.

That's Texas for you. The death- penalty system in the foremost death- penalty state in the U.S. is monumentally racist. When a black person kills a white person in Texas, authorities are quick to put the machinery of capital punishment in gear. And, as in the Beazley case, black people are routinely excluded from the judgment process. But it's a different story when a white person kills a black person. The death penalty study, by the Texas Defender Service, which represents indigent inmates on death row, noted that "Texas has never executed a white person for the murder of a black person."

 The study found that "across the state, the loss of non-white lives is treated less seriously than the loss of white lives."

 Apart from all of these issues is yet another problem with the Beazley case. The defendant was a minor � 17 years old � when the crime was committed in 1994. Most of the countries of the world prohibit the execution of prisoners who were juveniles when the offense was committed.

 According to Amnesty International, "Of the thousands of judicial executions documented worldwide in the past decade, only 25 have been of prisoners who were under 18 at the time of the crime. Of these 25, more than half � 13 � were carried out in the United States." Seven of those executions were done in Texas.

 As a society, we should have some sense of the immaturity, the impulsiveness and the frequently appalling lack of judgment that are so often part of the teenage years. They are not defenses for murder. But they are reasons for us to withhold the ultimate punishment from offenders who were not fully grown, and thus may not have been fully responsible for all of their actions.

Napoleon Beazley's life should be spared. Imprisonment for life is sufficient.