Word: roemer
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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...
There was nothing abstract about Roemer's words. The human life in his hands was that of Dalton Prejean, 30, a semiretarded killer scheduled to die in the electric chair shortly after midnight on Friday morning. Prejean was just 17 when he murdered a state trooper in 1977. His execution would be the first under a 1989 Supreme Court ruling permitting states to impose capital punishment for acts committed by 16- and 17-year-olds...
When Prejean lost his final legal appeal as expected Thursday evening, only the Governor, with his power of clemency, could spare him. "If it were just a question of law, there wouldn't be the anguish involved," said Roemer, lapsing into near biblical cadences even as he glanced at his watch to see if was time to pick up his nine-year-old son Dakota and take him to baseball practice. "The law having been writ, a human stands under the tree. The courts having ruled, I stand with him. I have to make a decision...
When bouncy Buddy Roemer, 45, took over as Governor of Louisiana last year, he struck the pose of a reformer determined to energize a state with the nation's highest unemployment and one of its worst educational systems. Now he is staggering, jolted by the defeat of his key reform: a tax plan that would have shifted some of the burden from business to the middle class...
Saying he was "disappointed" that 55% of the voters had rejected his plan, Roemer last week proposed laying off thousands of state employees and closing vocational schools and hospitals. That would shrink up to $720 million from a budget already shriveled by a decline in tax revenues from oil companies. It would still leave the legislature with an unhappy choice: extend the 3% sales tax that Roemer's new measures would have replaced or accept severe cutbacks in vital government services...