Word: louisiana
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Buddy Roemer was seated at his desk in the Louisiana Governor's mansion last Thursday afternoon, the same lonely desk he would return to late that night. "If you're a Governor, or ever dreamed to be, this will be your most difficult decision," he said in a soft yet intense voice. "It won't be balancing the budget, it won't be paying for judges, it won't be taxes, it won't be how to protect the environment. All those are important. But the most difficult will be the decision to take a single human being's life...
Prejean's guilt was never in dispute. Early on the morning of July 2, 1977, Louisiana state trooper Donald Cleveland stopped Prejean and his brother Joseph on a routine traffic violation. As Cleveland began to frisk the argumentative Joseph, Dalton crept behind the car, pulled out a pistol and fired two shots into the trooper's head. Prejean had also killed a taxi driver during an aborted robbery when he was 14. "I'm not bloodthirsty," insisted the officer's widow Candy Cleveland the morning before the execution. "But what kind of person am I supposed to be? I have...
Those and other legal arguments eventually failed as the Supreme Court steadily narrowed the grounds to block executions. But clemency is rooted in morality as well as the law, and these grounds prompted the Louisiana board of pardons to recommend commuting Prejean's sentence to life imprisonment without parole. And although there were two other executions last week, in Missouri and Texas, it was Prejean's case that inspired protests from Amnesty International and the European Parliament. As Prejean's attorney John Hall argued, "Dalton's lack of control over his behavior is so obvious that it is hardly ennobling...
Five months into his first term, the city's first black mayor confronts an epidemic of bigotry and violence. -- The toughest choice a Governor can make is whether to execute a prisoner. Louisiana's Buddy Roemer decided last week that Dalton Prejean should...
...Reveilletown, a farming community that abutted a chemical plant until it was relocated in 1988 as the result of a class action she instigated. A former captain in the corrections department, Dickerson began working full time for Gulf Coast in January and helped organize this week's Second Great Louisiana March Against Poisons. "All we want," she says, "is for the air and water to get cleaner so that it doesn't pose a danger...