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Beazley

The entire column is worth reading, but Jay Nordlinger's much-needed corrective of the Jonathan Beazley coverage especially:

Readers may remember the case of John Luttig and Napoleon Beazley. Luttig was a Texas man, the father of noted federal judge J. Michael Luttig; Beazley was the senior Luttig�s murderer. Judge Luttig wrote a shockingly powerful �victim-impact statement� about his father�s death. Beazley became a minor cause c�l�bre of the Left, journalistic and otherwise, because he was young, black, the �opponent� of a prominent conservative, and given capital punishment in Texas. That state has now finally thrown the switch.

The reporting on this story remains a little screwy. For example, the Associated Press article on Beazley�s execution said that he had killed Luttig �while trying to steal his Mercedes.� (Interesting that the make of the car should be mentioned, don�t you think? What if the vehicle had been a modest Plymouth?)

The AP story was misleading. Last August, this website ran a memorable piece on the Luttig case by R. Ted Cruz. As he explained, some journalists made it sound as though an honor student had accidentally shot a man in some horrible prank gone awry. But this is what happened:

As the federal court of appeals recounted, Beazley told his friends he wanted to kill somebody, he followed the Luttigs in their car for several miles, he observed to his friends that he was �going to have to shoot [the] driver,� he followed them into their garage, and he threw 63-year-old John Luttig to the ground, shot him once in the side of the head, ran around the car to fire at Bobbie Luttig, and then returned to fire another bullet at close range into John Luttig�s head.

Mrs. Luttig, �who watched her husband die, survived only because she feigned death and rolled under the car, while Beazley drove over her."

Only one correction: he was executed by lethal injection, not electrocution (as Nordlinger suggests).

[Posted at 21:41 CST on 06/11/02] [Link]

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