Court halts Irving killer's execution

HUNTSVILLE, Texas – A condemned killer from Irving avoided the nation's busiest death chamber Thursday night when the U.S. Supreme Court gave him a reprieve.

Attorneys for Carlton Turner Jr., who was convicted of killing his parents, had appealed to the high court hoping the justices' review of lethal injection procedures in Kentucky, announced earlier this week, could keep him from execution.

In a brief, one-paragraph order, the court said it had granted his stay of execution. The order came more than four hours after he could have been executed and less than two hours before the death warrant would have expired at midnight.

"All I can say is all glory to God," Mr. Turner told prison officials as he was being returned to death row, in another prison about 45 miles east of Huntsville.

The Supreme Court order made no mention of its reasons for stopping the punishment.

Mr. Turner would have been the 27th Texas inmate to be executed this year and the second this week.

After state courts earlier Thursday refused to halt the punishment, Mr. Turner's lawyers went to the Supreme Court, which on Tuesday agreed to review an appeal from two condemned inmates in Kentucky who argued the three-drug process used in lethal injection is unconstitutionally cruel. The same procedure is used in Texas.

"The inmate will be forced into a chemical straitjacket, unable to express the fact of his suffocation," the appeal in Mr. Turner's case alleged.

Mr. Turner's lawyers went early Thursday to his trial court judge with a request to withdraw the execution order. When that failed, they went to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which voted 5-4 to refuse to stop the punishment. The case then went to the Supreme Court.

Also Thursday, Alabama Gov. Bob Riley granted a 45-day stay of execution for Alabama death row inmate Tommy Arthur within hours of his scheduled lethal injection for a 1982 contract murder.

In Texas, Mr. Turner, 28, had said before the reprieve that he didn't find the prospect of death frightening but was concerned about possible pain from the lethal injection, which is the foundation of the appeal in the Kentucky case.

"The only thing I worry about is when the process is starting, the suffocation and pain if the anesthesia doesn't work," he told The Associated Press last week. "They say it's like drowning. I'm hoping it's not like that.

"But you're dead after that. So it's not torture. You're not coming back. To me, it's not something I would be scared of."

On Tuesday, when the justices announced they would consider the issue, another Texas inmate was executed hours later, but attorneys for Mr. Turner suggested the short time period didn't allow them to prepare an adequate appeal for the convicted killer, Michael Richard. The justices, however, did consider the motion lawyer David Dow sent before turning it down, and Mr. Richard was executed after about a two-hour delay.

Another Texas execution is scheduled for next week, one of at least three more set for this year in the state.

Mr. Turner, 28, has acknowledged fatally shooting his parents at their suburban Dallas home in 1998.

"The only thing that matters is I did what I did," he said. "This is the byproduct of something stupid that I did."

Source : Dallas Morning News