Does Napoleon Beazley Deserve to Die?
He was the hero of his hometown—football star, senior class president, the first black kid ever to be accepted by whites. And then, when he was seventeen, he committed a brutal, senseless murder. Now he's on death row, waiting for the courts to decide . . .
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The all-white jury (both the prosecution and the defense had rejected potential black jurors) found Napoleon guilty of capital murder. The staggering catalog of evidence—the fingerprints on the Mercedes, the shell casings, Fig Coleman's eyewitness testimony, the confession to Jimmy Moffett—all pointed squarely at Napoleon, who did not enter a plea of innocent or guilty and remained silent about his crime. To win a death sentence in the punishment phase of the trial, the prosecutors had to prove that Napoleon was likely to commit future acts of violence. Their argument relied not only on his past crack dealing but also on the testimony of the Colemans, who took the stand to make three damning assertions: Napoleon had boasted of wanting to kill someone, he was remorseless, and he had threatened to kill them if they talked of the crime. Two psychologists subsequently testified that Napoleon was a future danger to society, basing their assessments in large part on the Colemans' accounts. But in sworn affidavits that the Colemans signed after receiving life sentences, they recanted their most damaging testimony, claiming they had lied as part of a deal with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty themselves. FBI investigators and even the Colemans' own lawyers, however, signed affidavits denying their claims of deal making. District attorney Jack Skeen, Jr., also vehemently denies any deal. "This was a deliberate, preplanned, cold-blooded crime that showed a wanton disregard for human life," he says. "The facts of the crime itself were sufficient to prove future dangerousness."
What moved the jury more than any crime-scene photograph or 911 phone call ever could was the testimony of Judge J. Michael Luttig, whose eloquence on the stand gave jurors a glimpse of the anguish and profound loss that his father's murder had wrought. A man of quiet intensity, he was ever-present, his brow furrowed in concentration as he listened to witnesses and viewed the evidence at hand. He took the stand on the last day of the punishment phase, and as he sat in the witness box, he searched for the words to capture a personal tragedy so shattering that it defied description. His father had been a man of great integrity and principle, he said, who was not only his hero but his best friend. "I worshiped the ground that he walked on," he said to the jury. He told of picking out the clothes his father would be buried in. He told of how his mother trembled through the night from fear and bolted out of bed at the slightest noise. He told of hearing that the blood seeping from his father's head had "sounded like running water." He told of his sister's horror at viewing their father's body. He told of spending Christmas at his father's graveside, smoothing the soil around the marker, "so it will be perfect in the way that he always wanted things for you. And then you sit there. You sit there for hours. Wait till the sun goes down, and it's cold. You sit there until finally you can't, and you get up and leave. And you say, 'Merry Christmas.'"
The jury sentenced Napoleon Beazley to death after less than two hour's deliberation. Though an unusual array of witnesses had come forward on his behalf—his high school principal, football coach, teachers, friends, and fellow church members—it was not enough to sway the jury. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his conviction on appeal, and after the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court's denial of habeas corpus relief, Napoleon's execution date was set for August 15, 2001. State district judge Cynthia Stevens Kent, who had presided over his trial, subsequently voiced her concerns in a letter to Governor Rick Perry that Napoleon was too young to be executed. "It is my recommendation that due to his age at the time of the offense that you consider carefully and grant his request that his sentence be commuted from the death sentence to a sentence of life imprisonment," she wrote. No less remarkable, Houston County district attorney Cindy Garner, who lives in Grapeland, wrote to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles: "Based on my knowledge of Napoleon Beazley as a person, as well as my knowledge of the facts of his criminal offense, I would not have sought the death penalty had this case been filed in Houston County." As Napoleon's execution date neared, six of the sixteen members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles—which can recommend that the governor grant clemency—voted to commute his sentence to life. It was the board's closest vote, apart from one case of likely innocence, in the past one hundred capital cases it had reviewed. Governor Perry could have granted a thirty-day reprieve, but he did not: "I am comfortable that my seventeen-year-old son knows the difference between right and wrong," he later said. "And the law in the state of Texas says a seventeen-year-old has to take responsibility for his actions. My duty is to uphold the law."
Last June Napoleon's appellate attorneys, David L. Botsford and Walter Long, of Austin, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Napoleon's appeal and grant him a stay of execution. The attorneys presented several arguments, citing both Constitutional and international law; foremost among them was the claim that executing people who were under the age of eighteen at the time of their crime constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. As the case was weighed by the nation's highest court, three justices with personal ties to Judge Luttig— Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and David Souter—recused themselves from deliberations. Their absence left the court in a deadlock—three for a stay, three against—resulting in a denial of the stay. In turn, Botsford and Long filed a last-minute petition with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, raising numerous issues, among them Napoleon's age at the time of the crime, racial bias on the all-white jury that convicted him, and the veracity of the Colemans' testimony. On August 15 the Court of Criminal Appeals, in an unusual 6-3 decision, decided to stay Napoleon Beazley's execution "pending further orders by this court." The court did not specify which issues it would examine nor when it would make its decision regarding whether the execution should proceed.
Napoleon had already bid good-bye to Ireland and Rena and was sitting a few feet from the death chamber, writing his last statement, when prison chaplain Jim Brazzil came to tell him the news. Napoleon stopped writing and looked up at the chaplain, stunned. Brazzil asked him if he was all right. "Yes, I'm fine," Napoleon said. "I just have to comprehend this. Give me a second."
The first thing you come to grips with is dying, and afterwards there are only reasons to live.
letter from Napoleon Beazley
THE LAST TIME I SAW NAPOLEON BEAZLEY, it was a gray and blustery winter day outside the Terrell Unit. Since arriving at death row, Napoleon has had a perfect disciplinary record; by all accounts, he is a model prisoner who has spent his time imparting the life lessons he has learned to other inmates. "I've destroyed enough lives, so saving them is important," he told me. "My self-redemption is important. The biggest apology I can give is to change and to show through my actions that I am a changed person." He now spends his time in isolation, his movements limited to a six-by-ten-foot concrete cell with a slit of window, which provides a glimpse of sky above. That winter day, I stared at Napoleon through the Plexiglas that separated us and wondered at the true, innermost thoughts of a person who was, even to his closest friends, an enigma. He had committed an unconscionable crime, one for which he should pay dearly. Never again should he have the freedom to run through the grass in his bare feet, as he has longed to do, or to know the comfort of a moment outside these walls. But was death the appropriate punishment? "I'm biased," he acknowledged. "I'm biased. But I do believe in forgiveness. I believe in rehabilitation. I believe that I can do some good while I'm still here."
Eight years after the murder of John Luttig, Grapeland is still consumed with questions about what went wrong that April night. "We need to look at why this happened," says George Pierson, a black city councilman who also happens to be a former warden of death row. "Everyone in Grapeland should feel some blame. Children aren't raised just by their parents but by a community. We are part of the community." Pierson, who oversaw 22 executions, sent a letter to the governor expressing his opposition to Napoleon's execution. "He took a life," Pierson says. "But justice is not equal. I saw inmates who had committed multiple murders, or who had killed blacks, who didn't get the death penalty. Napoleon is not the worst of the worst." For Napoleon's friends, who have married and have children of their own, there is a yawning sense of guilt as life moves on. But no one's burden is heavier than that of Ireland and Rena's. The heartache of their son's deed is worn for all to see, their faces lined with the disquiet of parents for whom sleep does not come easily. "Sometimes I think it must be a bad dream," says Rena, who has been hospitalized twice in recent years for depression. "I've gone back and I just can't understand. Where did we go wrong?" For Ireland, the anguish is no less than his wife's. "I had to do a lot of soul-searching during the Jasper trial because I knew exactly what the father of [James Byrd's killer] Bill King was going through," he says. "That man may be the worst racist in the world, but I wouldn't wish this hell on anyone."
That night, beneath the lacquered Bible quotations and outstretched ceramic angel wings that line the Beazleys' living room walls, they hosted a prayer service—as they do each month with fellow church members—in which they tried to summon forth divine assistance for Napoleon and the Luttig family. Sorrowful hymns drifted out into the night as friends and family crowded into the small brick house, their tears mixed with testimonials. "Show mercy, Lord," Ireland exhorted, his voice choked with emotion. "Show mercy." Standing behind him in the kitchen was his eighteen-year-old son, Jamaal, a Grapeland Sandies offensive guard who is now in the second semester of his senior year. The captain of the football team, Jamaal can bench-press 375 pounds, though his big, broad-shouldered build belies his shyness. He is a quiet, serious boy who harbors no dreams of athletic glory: Someday, he said, he wants to be an accountant. Jamaal has learned from his brother's example; he picks his friends carefully, and he never strays far from home. "I'm not popular like Napoleon," he said. "But if I get into other people's business, I'll get into something I don't want to. I don't want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Jamaal told me this outside the Beazleys' house as we looked up in the dark country night at the stars. They shone brightly above the line of hackberry trees, where his brother had once ditched his .45-caliber pistol, hoping that it would never be uncovered. Jamaal pointed out the North Star, then the Big Dipper. "I think I'd be pretty good at astronomy," he said quietly, before resuming his study of the sky. It grew late, and I finally left, driving down the dimly lit streets of the Quarters, a place where even the best and the brightest can get dragged down. Jamaal stayed behind, still staring up at the stars. I hoped he would be safe.
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