Quote:
HUNTSVILLE — A narrow majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices voted Thursday to halt the execution of a former Roosevelt High School student for the second time this year.
Troy Kunkle already had been served his last meal when the stay came at 6:30 p.m. — a half-hour after his execution was to take place.
The court's decision offered no explanation but indicated the justices split along a familiar 5-4 margin that marks many of their most controversial rulings.
The order came at a time the justices are widely perceived to be prodding Texas judges to look closer at capital punishment appeals — particularly at the state's highest criminal court, which a day earlier denied a similar request from Kunkle.
The justices used just two paragraphs to halt the lethal injection, and Kunkle, who has spent more than half his life on death row, needed only one word to summarize his reaction.
"Ecstatic," he told Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and then added, "Praise God."
The ruling offered only temporary relief to the 38-year-old who shot a Corpus Christi resident during a stickup two decades ago and then recited lyrics from the heavy metal song "No Remorse."
The decision will stall the case until the justices can further review claims Kunkle's attorneys filed only hours earlier. The process could take weeks or months.
And it remains far from clear Kunkle will win a substantial victory, as his four previous postponements ended with no change.
Each stay wears on the family of the victim, Steven Wayne Horton, whose 75-year-old parents wanted to avoid stress by not attending the execution.
"I don't think it's fair and right," Horton's sister Brenda LaCour said by telephone from Corpus Christi. "We've waited too long."
The Supreme Court issued a similar stay in July, nine hours before Kunkle was scheduled to die. Three months later, the court let the case proceed.
This time, however, the five justices who voted to delay the execution would have a more-than-sufficient majority to add the case to the court's docket, should they decide it's warranted.
According to a spokesman for the court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist joined Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas in voting to let the lethal injection flow.
Kunkle's appeal to the Supreme Court followed other recently successful arguments there that before 1991, Texas often did not allow jurors to sufficiently consider mitigating evidence in defendants' backgrounds.
Kunkle's lawyers claim jurors might have spared the then-18-year-old had they heard about his troubled childhood and his family's history of mental illness.
So now it seems like there are undertones of the U.S. Supreme Court versus the Texas State Supreme Court. Especially when it comes to looking at Capital Punishment Appeals. I fear they are going to overturn his Death Penalty. I've seen a couple of website devoted to abolishing the Death Penalty and Kunkle's name has come up several times. Supposedly, a couple of jurors (now years later) claim that they would not have voted for execution had they known about his "troubled childhood." What a crock!