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The Walls Unit's holding cells, where death row
inmates spend their last hours prior to being executed.
The death chamber is at the far end of the corridor. |
HUNTSVILLE, Tex. — A federal appeals court in New Orleans on Tuesday granted a Texas inmate’s request for a stay of execution hours before he was scheduled to die.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans granted the request from lawyers for the inmate, Robert James Campbell, on the grounds that his execution be stopped because of intellectual disability. The stay came just hours after it had refused to stop the execution based on a different line of reasoning.
Mr. Campbell’s lawyers said that new information uncovered in state files showed that he had an intellectual disability and was ineligible for execution. They said state officials withheld the results of two I.Q. tests given to Mr. Campbell — a 68 when he was a child and a 71 shortly after he arrived on death row at the age of 19. Mr. Campbell is now 41.
The United States Supreme Court has banned the execution of those whom the law refers to as mentally retarded, and has said that an I.Q. score of “approximately 70” indicates retardation.
Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said he had walked to Mr. Campbell’s cell here at the Walls Unit prison, where the execution chamber is, to inform him of the stay. But Mr. Campbell had already heard the news.
“He was talking with the chaplains who were there at the front of the cell,” Mr. Clark said. “He was smiling. He says, ‘I’m happy. The Lord prevailed.'”
Minutes later, Mr. Campbell boarded a van and was driven back to death row, which is about an hour away at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Tex.
Mr. Campbell’s sister, Terri Bridges, told KPRC-TV that the family was “very happy,” adding, “The way they prosecuted him was unfair and unjust. He should have had a better trial than what he had.”
Source: The New York Times, May 13, 2014
