To live and die in Texas

When it comes to killing prisoners like young Napoleon Beazley, there's no stopping the Lone Star state's execution express

9.06.2002

William Walker

BRETT COOMER/AP

EXECUTION DAY: An opponent of the death penalty in Huntsville, Texas, hangs his head on May 28, the day Napoleon Beazley was given a lethal injection there. Since 1995, the year George W. Bush became governor, Texas has executed 186 prisoners. This year's toll is 15.

BRETT COOMER/AP

NO CLEMENCY: Protesters demonstrate against the execution of Napoleon Beazley on May 28 in Huntsville, Texas. Beazley, 25, was executed by lethal injection for the 1994 murder of oilman John Luttig in a botched carjacking. The American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and South Africa's Bishop Desmond Tutu all joined state and local officials calling in vain for clemency in the contentious case.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas IT IS APTLY named the "Walls Unit." Its blood-red brick walls rise menacingly four storeys above a downtown Huntsville street, rifle-toting guards standing in towers at each of its corners.

 It is more commonly known as the Texas death chamber � the place Napoleon Beazley came to die.

 Texas doesn't keep prisoners here. It kills them, at the alarming rate of about once every two weeks, more often than anywhere else in the United States.

 Beazley was a high school football star and class president who turned young offender in 1994 when he shot and killed Tyler, Texas, oilman John Luttig in a botched carjacking. Errors, racial bias and false testimony at his trial be damned, since there ultimately was no stopping the Texas execution express in his case, despite an international outcry for clemency.

 On May 28, inside an eggshell-blue room and under cold fluorescent lights, Beazley was strapped face-up to a gurney oddly shaped like a holy cross, with flaps at each side for his outstretched arms.

 Leather belts strapped down his arms, legs and torso. Needles were placed in both arms and he was injected with a saline solution. Beazley declined to make a final verbal statement, leaving only a written one.

 An anonymous executioner, seated in a nearby room, injected him by remote control with sodium thiopental (a sedative), pancuronium bromide (a muscle relaxant) and potassium chloride (to stop his heart from beating).

 It took about 10 seconds for Beazley to fall unconscious. Seventeen minutes later, he was pronounced dead. It was the end of a troubling tale of Texas justice, one that legal experts and civil-rights activists hope isn't forgotten on the formidable scrap heap of state execution statistics.

 Beazley left behind a message of hope that his execution, and the questions surrounding it, will lead to a re-examination of the Texas capital-punishment system entrenched by President George W. Bush when he served as governor from 1995 to 2000.

 To understand Bush's Texas, one must understand how frontier justice is still meted out here. It's a cautionary tale about how Bush, as president, wants justice served across America.

 From 1982, when the state's death penalty was reinstated, to 1995, 85 prisoners were executed. In the years since Bush was elected governor, 186 prisoners were executed. This year alone, Texas has put 15 prisoners to death by lethal injection.

 The Beazley case won't soon be forgotten by his grieving parents, Rena and Ireland, or his sister, Maria, and baby brother, Jamaal. A tightly knit, middle-class family, they all were regulars at the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Grapeland, a rural community (population 1,491) in east Texas.

 Ireland met Rena in high school, after a chance encounter at a community dance.

 "I started courting her in 1968," he says, sitting across from his wife of 30 years in the living room of their three-bedroom brick bungalow.

 A year into their marriage, they bought this land on Grapeland's Pine St. They brought in a trailer and lived in it for three years until they had enough money to build the house, where they have been ever since.

 Maria was 2 when Napoleon was born on Aug. 5, 1976, the year the house was built. It was to be the only home he'd ever know � except for the last eight years of his life, when home was a 3.5-by-4.5-metre concrete jail cell.

 Ceramic angels and framed family photos ring the brick fireplace that dominates the Beazley living room. There are pictures of Napoleon as a toddler and as a strapping adolescent who played Little League baseball under his father's tutelage.

 "At 6 years old, he was a little on the chubby side, so we got him involved in Little League and he lost some of that weight," Ireland says, stroking the gray hairs that have invaded his black goatee.

 "He was not a hard-headed little boy. He was mindful. He did what you asked him.

 "I coached him right up until he was 12 years old. It was something he and I did together.

 "When he got to high school, I think he decided he liked football better than baseball. But I thought he could have been a great baseball player. The Atlanta Braves was my team, so I always pictured him as another Ron Gant-type player, short, stocky and muscular."

 This happens to be Mother's Day and, as Ireland reminisces about their son, Rena stares blankly at the carpeted floor. It seems as if she'll never speak, her thoughts focused on her eldest son set to die in just over two weeks.

 Napoleon Beazley starred at Grapeland High School as his team's varsity football running back. He also ran track and got into weightlifting.

 With Maria off to Rice University and money tight around the house, he jettisoned his plan to attend Stanford University and enrolled in the U.S. Marines, hoping to attend college on the GI bill.

 He was voted runner-up as Mr. Grapeland High School, an all-around title going to the student who mixes excellence in athletics and academics.

 Beazley was immensely popular at the integrated high school, mixing easily among white and black students alike. But in the Quarters, his overwhelmingly black neighbourhood, some of the young men regarded him as a "sell-out" and often referred to him derisively as "White Boy."

 To Beazley, the high school accolades meant little if he was to be socially shunned in his own neighbourhood. Some in the Quarters resented the Beazley family's middle-class existence, with three cars in the driveway, central air conditioning and fashionable clothes.

 As is the case with many teenagers, the pain of being an outcast weighed heavily on Beazley.

 Then, Cedric Coleman came home from a failed attempt at playing football at a Houston junior college. Coleman, two years older, had preceded Beazley as the Grapeland Sandies' running back.

 Beazley looked up to him. He soon learned why Coleman was so flush with cash and held in seeming esteem among the neighbourhood's young black men: Coleman was dealing crack cocaine.

 Beazley was drawn into the illicit trade, often selling small rocks of crack out of his track pants to passersby who ventured out to the high school athletic field.

 Suddenly, those who once shunned him sought him out. He felt a growing sense of pride while hanging out in the neighbourhood.

 He saw Coleman had a .25-calibre pistol, so Beazley went out and bought himself an even more powerful Haskell .45.

 By now he was leading a double life: still popular and polite around town with elders, but a 17-year-old with "street cred" among the town's youth.

 One day in the spring of 1994, according to court testimony, Coleman told his pal he knew a fellow dealer who could get them good money for carjacking a Mercedes.

 "You down with that?" he asked, and Beazley replied without hesitation: "I'm down with that."

 So off they went that fateful night of April 19, 1994, with Coleman's younger brother, Donald, shotgun in hand, also in tow.

 They spotted John Luttig's cream-coloured Mercedes and followed it into the owner's driveway, with Luttig behind the wheel and wife Bobbie in the passenger's seat. Beazley, rushing up the driveway, shot and wounded Luttig as he got out of the car.

 He shot at Bobbie Luttig and missed. She fell, pretending to be dead. Beazley looked back and fired again, striking Luttig point-blank in the head and killing him.

 Bobbie Luttig later said she watched, terrified, face down on the pavement, as the blood poured out of her husband's body and down the sloped driveway.

 Weeks later, up past the rusting grain silos that line the railway tracks cutting through town, Rena Beazley was at her job as a teller at the Grapeland bank.

 The first hint something was wrong came when two FBI agents arrived, saying they had to impound her red Ford Probe sports car as part of an investigation.

 Rena immediately called Ireland at Nucor, the steel plant on the edge of town where he has worked as a lineman for 32 years.

 "We weren't alarmed," Ireland recalls. Rena sighs deeply, sitting on the plush living-room sofa. "They said they were investigating all the red Probes in the area and that's what I was driving."

 It was now June 7, 1994. Napoleon Beazley had gone up to Crockett, a town 15 minutes north of Grapeland, to see the Coleman brothers.

 He also had a girlfriend there. His father went to find him, but growing concerned that he couldn't, he went to the police station.

 "They told me what they were investigating and I was getting a little worried," he says. (The FBI was on the case because carjacking is a federal crime.)

 When Ireland Beazley finally located his son, the FBI had already arrested him. But the case had an added importance for the federal agency.

 Not only was John Luttig a prominent businessman and a member of the Tyler community, his son, Michael, was a federal judge on Virginia's Fourth Circuit court of appeals and a favourite in conservative circles, even touted as a potential U.S. Supreme Court justice.

 "Then the circus started," Ireland Beazley recalls, rubbing his forehead.

 "I was just hoping to post bail and get my son home. But that little old judge picked up the gavel, rapped it and hollered `one million dollars.' That just about broke my heart. I couldn't help it. I started to cry."

 Ireland, despite being the first black man elected to Grapeland town council, didn't know where to turn.

 "You know those westerns where they bring in the hanging judge? That seemed to be the mentality in that courtroom. And it just went downhill from there. It was just a downhill slide for Napoleon from that point on."

 Michael Luttig brought his court clerks and office files back to Texas from Virginia so he could attend the trial each day. He often tapped the prosecutor on the shoulder and whispered advice.

 The judge, Cynthia Kent, allowed a recess one day so the prosecutor could confer with Luttig overnight about questions for potential jurors.

 The result? An all-white jury of Beazley's "peers."

 A strategy unfolded. The prosecutors warned the Coleman brothers that they faced the death penalty unless they testified against Beazley.

 To secure a death penalty, the state had to prove Beazley was a risk to reoffend. That evidence would have to come from the Colemans, and as their survival instincts kicked in, they were coached on how to deliver it.

 The brothers, now in prison, have signed written affidavits recanting their testimony as false and explaining it was offered under the duress of avoiding capital punishment themselves.

 Worse, one of the white jurors told a defence investigator preparing an appeal (it's legal to question jurors about their deliberations in Texas) that, in his opinion, "that n----- got what he deserved."

 The man's wife wrote to the Texas parole board warning of her husband's racist tendencies. An appliance repairman, he refused to fix machines brought in by black customers.

 Kent was so alarmed by the developments that she was moved, in a highly unusual gesture, to write to Texas Governor Rick Perry and the parole board that Beazley's sentence should be commuted to life.

 Her view was endorsed by the Houston County lead prosecutor, who lived in Grapeland and knew Beazley, and by a former prison guard, a long-time veteran of death row who spoke out on the case.

 The American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, even South Africa's Bishop Desmond Tutu pleaded for clemency. But the governor, who is facing re-election this fall, refused. Eighteen members of the Texas state legislature agreed, but the parole board did not.

 Attorney Walter Long argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that, as a young offender, it was "cruel and unusual punishment" to execute Beazley. The justices did not agree.

 The fact is that in Texas, when a black person is convicted of killing a white person, the death penalty is sought with a vengeance, says Steven Drizin of the Northwestern University law school's Centre on Wrongful Convictions.

 Eighty-seven per cent of the 455 prisoners on Texas' death row are members of minorities, mostly black and Hispanic.

 Other states, like Illinois and Maryland, have suspended their death-penalty systems pending study of racial bias, but not Texas.

 "When you have a group of white people dealing with the fate of a black man, that just doesn't seem right," says Rena Beazley, finally moved to speak.

 "The races still don't really understand one another. That was a big problem I had with his trial. It just seems like, in Texas, they don't just execute the worst of the worst any more. People assumed he came from a broken home, that he was a thug and all that. But when they find out about him, that he was a good kid, his parents both work and they have a nice home, they just can't understand it."

 Beazley himself, just days before his execution, made no excuses for his crime.

 At age 25 but looking a decade older as he sat in a steel-mesh cage in the death-row prison at Livingston, Texas, he said he was a different person, someone who just wanted a chance at rehabilitation, even if that meant spending the rest of his life behind bars.

 "My thing about living on death row is just living," he said on the black telephone from behind prison Plexiglas.

 "My life starts now. If I wait until I get out, it's too late. So I embrace living here. I have a strong mind, so I look at it as a gift.

 "Dying is very easy. We all have to do it. It's the living that people find so hard. So I'm not focusing on the end. Life, and how I'm living it up to my execution date, is what's important to me now."