TEXAS EXECUTES MAN FOR MURDER COMMITTED AT 17, MISSOURI STAYS EXECUTION IN SIMILAR CASE

the Missouri Supreme Court granted Simmons, who was to be executed next week, a stay pending the outcome of a related United States Supreme Court case that will be decided by the end of June.
Beazley was put to death by lethal injection in Huntsville shortly after 6 p.m. after the United States Supreme Court refused to hear his petition and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his motion for a stay, and after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 10 to 7 against clemency.
Gov. Rick Perry accepted the board´s recommendation and denied Beazley´s request for a 30-day reprieve. "To delay his punishment would be to delay justice," the governor said in a statement shortly before Beazley´s execution.
Beazley shot John Luttig, 63, the father of a federal judge, in a botched carjacking in 1994. Luttig´s daughter, Suzanne Luttig, watched the execution in Huntsville but did not speak to reporters.
Beazley, who had been his high school senior class president and a football star in Grapeland, Texas, apologized in a handwritten statement for a murder that was "not just heinous, it was senseless."
Paddy Burwell, one of the board members who voted to commute Beazley´s punishment to a life sentence, was working on his ranch, between San Antonio and Victoria, when he learned that Beazley had been executed. "I´m really apprehensive that this is a day we´re going to be sorry about for a long time," Burwell said in a telephone interview. "I just feel like something really wrong has happened."
The pending United States Supreme Court case is expected to decide whether there is now a "national consensus" that executing the mentally retarded constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Lawyers for both Beazley and Simmons, as well as other legal experts, said that if the court outlaws the execution of the mentally retarded, the ruling could also undermine the opinion that allows the execution of inmates who committed capital murder when they were younger than 18.
The decisions made by courts and officials in Missouri and Texas show "how incredibly arbitrary the death penalty system is," said Elisabeth Semel, the director of the death penalty clinic of the Boalt School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. "Missouri looks to the Supreme Court and is apparently concerned that a decision is imminent that may have implications for the execution of Christopher Simmons," Semel said. "So it says stop. But Texas goes ahead."