Duane Buck Texas execution halted by supreme court

Duane Buck’s execution was halted after his lawyers contended his sentence was unfair because of a question asked about race during his trial Duane Buck, an inmate on Texas’s death row for the past 16 years, has been spared the lethal injection after the US supreme court stepped in and stayed his execution on the grounds that the jury at his sentencing hearing was told he was a danger to the public because he is black. The fact that it took the highest court in the nation to prevent the judicial killing of a prisoner in such controversial circumstances will put the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, further under the spotlight. He was earlier approached by lawyers of Buck and exhorted to use his power to put a 30-day reprieve on the execution to give time for all parties to look at his case, but Perry did not act. Perry, a frontrunner for the Republican nomination for next year’s presidential election, has presided over 235 executions since he became governor in 2000, the most recent just on Tuesday. Last week he defended his record at a presidential nomination debate at which the Republican TV audience cheered when the number of those who had died under him was mentioned. Buck, 48, killed his former girlfriend and a man in 1995. His guilt is not in dispute, but the fashion in which he was handed out the death penalty is. The jury that gave him the ultimate punishment was told by a psychologist, under prosecution cross-examination, that black people pose a greater risk to violent reoffending if released from jail. Buck is an African-American. The evidence of the psychologist, Dr Walter Quijano, was recognised as a huge legal problem by Texas’s then attorney general John Cornyn in 2000. Six other cases in which Quijano had given racially-tinged testimony were identified and all of them were awarded a resentencing hearing. On legal technicalities, Buck has been awarded no such safeguard. The intervention of the US supreme court gives the prisoner one last chance to plead for commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment. The issue of the death penalty is by no means at an end in Texas, however. The state executes more people each year than any other state in the nation, and has two executions scheduled for next week. Texas United States Capital punishment Human rights Rick Perry Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 15, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.