Word: prejean
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with such decisions. On the day he took office in 1988, there was an execution scheduled for that evening -- a grotesque welcome-to-power gift orchestrated by the outgoing Edwin Edwards, whom Roemer had defeated. "He knew that would affect me," the Governor recalls. He allowed it to proceed. Prejean was the fourth man to die in the electric chair during Roemer's two years in office. Last August, however, Roemer at the last minute blocked the execution of Ronald Monroe because of lingering doubts about his guilt. A lawyer close to the Monroe case cracked last week, "There...
...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...
...murder of a police officer in this state is a crime punishable by death," he said. "So on behalf of 780 state troopers, and thousands of police officers who put their lives on the line every day, the execution will proceed." That hard line brushed aside mitigating circumstances: Prejean was remorseful and semiretarded, with partial brain damage and a history of abuse as a child. He was also a black juvenile convicted by an all-white jury...
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...
...credit, Roemer never fled from the responsibility for his decision. The Governor conducted a deathwatch of his own in the hours before the execution, waiting for phone calls from Prejean's lawyers at his desk in the executive mansion. "I'll be here," he said in advance. "Not liking it. But ready to do my duty." Shortly before 10 p.m., attorney Andrea Robinson called Roemer to make her final appeal: "I told the Governor I wasn't there to make legalistic arguments, but that we were killing a child...