On Tuesday, November 17, an alleged “insane” killer named Gerald Eldridge was eating his “last meal” when he received a stay of execution from a Houston federal judge, according to the Houston Chronicle. The next day, Wednesday, Danielle Simpson, was unceremoniously escorted into the death chamber and put to death. Unlike Eldridge’s headline stay story, Simpson’s execution warranted a one paragraph report in the Chronicle—probably because he had previously asked to be put to death before changing his mind at the last moment.

            But it was Robert Lee Thompson’s execution on Thursday that drew bold front-page coverage in the Chronicle. The primary news peg in Thompson’s case was that earlier this week the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended to Gov. Rick Perry that the killer’s life sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. The board’s decision was based on the fact that Thompson had been convicted under Texas’ “law of parties” for the 1996 killing of a Houston convenience store clerk, Mansoor Rahim Mohammad. In other words, he did not fire the fatal shot that killed the clerk. The actual triggerman in the killing was Sammy Butler who was also convicted of the killing but spared the death penalty by a separate jury and is currently serving a life sentence.

            Let’s size all this up: the insane killer get a stay, the killer who asked to be put to death got his wish, and the killer who did not fire the fatal shot that killed the victim was put to death while the real killer is serving a life sentence. The only one of these three cases that makes much sense is the Simpson case—he got what he asked for, no matter that he changed his mind at the last minute. You don’t ask to be executed if you don’t mean it—there’s no second bite of the apple in these cases.

            Perhaps the most bizarre of the three cases is the Eldridge case. The federal court granted a stay to give the condemned man’s attorney a chance to prove his client is too mentally incompetent to understand his own execution. But the very Chronicle news article that reported his the stay belies the “too insane to be executed’ argument. The condemned inmate had enough sense to order a final meal of pancakes, peanut butter, oatmeal cookies and chocolate milk, according to the newspaper. A prison spokesman, according to the Chronicle, said Eldridge had been on the telephone with a family member when he actually received word of the 90-day stay order and was “very emotional” about the news.

            An insane person does not have the mental capacity to order a final meal, to speak coherently with a family member on the telephone about his impending execution, and to emotionally rejoice at the news of a stay. The legal criterion to bar execution for mental incompetence is that the condemned inmate lack the ability to understand he is about to be executed and to grasp the enormity of it. Eldridge knew he had one “last meal” (and clearly made the best of it based on what he ordered) and he knew a “stay” meant the execution had been stopped (and that he could probably finish off the last meal). And he had enough sense to be “very emotional” about the stay order—a fair indication that he understood what was about to happen to him.

            As for the Thompson execution, it reinforces my firm belief that the “law of parties” should not apply in a capital case. The death penalty, if it is to be applied, should be applied only to the actual perpetrator of the murder—and no execution should ever be carried out against the non-triggerman when triggerman is given a life sentence. Texas has carried out several executions like this—and, in fact, the state executed two men on the theory that each fired the single bullet from the same gun that killed a store clerk.

            But the Thompson case has some serious underlying factors that make it difficult to call his execution a travesty. He and Butler had committed at least eight other store robberies, and in three of those robberies store employees were killed. In fact, in the robbery for which he was executed, Thompson shot a second clerk four times, fired at least two shots at Rahim, tried to fire a fifth shot at the second clerk’s neck, and when the gun didn’t fire, he pistol-whipped the wounded clerk and beat him over the head with a cash tray.

            To say the least, Thompson and Butler were some bad guys who admittedly wanted to hurt store clerks Thompson felt were exploitative of black people. They killed several of these clerks in their crime spree, and but for the grace of God, Thompson would have killed the second clerk at the Seven Evenings convenience store in 1996; in fact, he did everything he could to kill him.

            Still, Thompson’s execution leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It’s just not right to execute a man for a murder he did not commit. Regardless of how bad or evil he may have been, Thompson did not kill Mansoor Rahim Mohammed—and, therefore, he should not have been executed for it.

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6722762.html

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6725712.html