Supreme Court stays execution of Texas inmate News
Supreme Court stays execution of Texas inmate

[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website] on Thursday stayed the execution [order, PDF] of Lester Leroy Bower, a Texas inmate who was convicted in 1984 of murdering four men in an airplane hangar. February 10 was his sixth scheduled execution date. Bower has maintained his innocence since charged, and filed a petition for certiorari [text, PDF] in September. The justices have yet to decide whether certiorari will be granted, prompting Bower’s attorneys to file a stay of execution. The request for stay went to Justice Antonin Scalia first, who serves as the circuit justice for the geographic region including Texas. The full court agreed to order the stay. There are no noted dissents, but the stay will automatically terminate if the court decides not to review Bower’s case. The petition for certiorari is asking the court to consider three issues. The first is whether the Texas sentencing procedures at the time of Bower’s trial allowed the jury to consider mitigating evidence of good behavior. During Bower’s 1984 trial, the prosecution alleged that Bower was one of few in Texas who possessed the ammunition assumed used to murder the four men. After Bower was convicted the state disclosed evidence contradicting the prosecution’s theory. Bower has also asked the court to consider whether a conviction aided by the failure of prosecutors to produce evidence that contradicted the state’s theory violates due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments [text]. Finally, the petition asks the court to review whether the execution of an inmate who has been on death row for more than 30 years amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

Use of the death penalty [JURIST backgrounder] has been a controversial issue throughout the US and internationally. In January the Supreme Court denied a stay of execution [JURIST report] to a Texas inmate with an IQ of 67. Also in January an Indiana senator proposed a bill to end the death penalty in the state, and the Washington state legislature proposed bills [JURIST reports] to eliminate the death penalty. In May the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [official website] urged the US to impose a moratorium on the use of the death penalty following a botched execution [JURIST reports] performed in Oklahoma the previous week.