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March 3, 2005, 1:30AM For one family, ruling is a bittersweet triumphThe decision sparing juveniles comes years after appeals ran out for Napoleon BeazleyBy MIKE TOLSONCopyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
His supporters tried hard to persuade Texas courts to spare his life because he was 17 when he committed his crime. As a result, he became a cause célèbre to anti-death-penalty activists and his case received publicity throughout the country. Their efforts fell short and Beazley was executed in 2002, but the U.S. Supreme Court validated their campaign this week when it banned the execution of juvenile offenders. "It was a good day for his mom and his dad," said attorney Walter Long, who had worked on Beazley's appeals. "They perceived this issue as something their son had fought for very valiantly. For it to ultimately win at the Supreme Court was very good for them." Long recalled how he was driving to Huntsville to say his final goodbye to Beazley when he got a call from the attorney for Christopher Simmons, a death row inmate in Missouri who was challenging the juvenile death penalty. Simmons had been granted a stay by the Missouri Supreme Court pending the outcome of the Atkins case then before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Texas courts were unsympathetic, and Beazley was executed on schedule. Simmons' case ultimately was used by the U.S. Supreme Court to ban the practice of executing juvenile offenders. "Two different destinies in two different states were based very much on the different decisions that were made by the state courts," Long said. "I was thinking about that yesterday. Napoleon considered it his calling to demonstrate the possibility of rehabilitation in a youthful offender. The way he could try to make up for what he had done was to do the best he could to make himself the person he had the potential to be, to set the example that kids are redeemable. The court's decision was a victory in that regard." Beazley, sent to death row for the murder of John Luttig, 63, during a 1994 carjacking in Tyler, was one of 13 juvenile offenders executed in Texas since 1985. Most of the others received modest attention. An exception was Gary Graham, who also was adopted by activists critical of capital punishment practices in Texas. Graham was convicted of killing Bobby Grant Lambert, 53, during a robbery outside a Houston grocery store in 1981. Graham's supporters claimed he was convicted on thin evidence, principally an eyewitness identification by one woman, and was denied a fair trial because of poor work by his attorney. In earlier appeals, Graham also raised his age as an issue, saying his jurors should have been instructed to consider his youth as a mitigating factor. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that courts had no obligation to do that. Graham's execution in 2000 brought a media circus to Huntsville. Celebrity supporters, including Bianca Jagger and Jesse Jackson, showed up. Thousands of protesters chanted and marched in the streets surrounding the Walls unit. Hundreds of reporters from across the country covered the event, which culminated in Graham's rambling, angry final statement in which he denounced the death sentence as a "legal lynching." The last juvenile offender executed in Texas was Toronto Patterson, who was convicted in the shooting death of 3-year-old Ollie Brown during a robbery at her family's home in Dallas. Ollie's mother and sister also were killed. Patterson admitted involvement in the crime but denied he had killed the little girl. Other executed juvenile offenders in Texas include: •Charles Rumbaugh: Convicted of killing Michael Fiorello, 58, during the robbery of his Amarillo jewelry store. Executed September 1985.
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