Eyes on Supreme Court in Execution Case Tuesday (today)

[babylonsister]

Eyes on Supreme Court in Execution Case Tuesday


By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: October 30, 2007

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 — By 6 p.m. Tuesday, when a Mississippi inmate is scheduled to die by lethal injection, the Supreme Court may give the clearest indication so far of whether it intends to call a halt to all such executions while a case from Kentucky that the justices accepted last month remains undecided.

The Mississippi inmate, Earl W. Berry, convicted of kidnapping and murder in 1988, has been turned down by the Mississippi Supreme Court and by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Late on Monday, the justices denied his appeal of the state court ruling, as well as the application for a stay of execution that accompanied it.

Mr. Berry’s application for a stay of the Fifth Circuit ruling, which his lawyers filed on Monday afternoon, remained pending in the evening, having come in very late in the afternoon.

In turning down the state-court appeal without any apparent dissent, the Supreme Court’s three-sentence order provided a brief explanation. The Supreme Court had no jurisdiction, the unsigned order said, because “the judgment of the Mississippi Supreme Court relies upon an adequate and independent state ground.”

The Mississippi Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 11 that Mr. Berry’s challenge to the lethal injection procedure was barred as a matter of state law because he had not presented the claim in his earlier appeals. The United States Supreme Court’s own jurisdiction is limited to deciding independent questions of federal law.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/washington/30scotus.html

[flashl]

1. IMHO none of these characters have credibility on this issue ...

Mississippi Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

[seriousstan]

2. The husband's words........

"I left home to head to Dallas that week," remembered the retired truck driver. "I remember telling her I loved her before I got on the road. She was on her way to church. When I got back to town four days later my nephew told me I needed to come to the church. I was tired so I was going to take a nap first, and that's when he told me Mary was missing."

Bounds said that when he looked for his wife, all he found were her car, her purse and some blood on the ground. After hours of searching, Mary Bounds' body was found in a wooded area. She had been beaten to death.

"That man took my wife into those woods and beat her head up against a tree until he thought she was dead and I have to live with that," Bounds said with anger in his voice. "He killed my wife while I was in Dallas, Texas, driving a truck. Can you imagine how that made me feel? It makes me feel real small that I wasn't home to protect her, real small."