Stays Of Execution

A Mexican prisoner scheduled to be executed Aug. 30 received a 30-day reprieve Friday when Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating granted him more time to explore new appeals. Keating spokesman Dan Mahoney said the stay was given to Gerardo Valdez "out of courtesy" to the Mexican government, which has asked Oklahoma not to kill him. Keating previously declined a request from Mexico to commute Valdez's sentence to life in prison.

A Mexican man whose Oklahoma death sentence has been criticized by the Mexican government won an indefinite stay of execution from the state's highest court, citing a "serious matter" of international law. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals acted on an appeal from defense lawyers seeking a new trial for Gerardo Valdez based on an international treaty and new evidence the lawyers say shows Valdez was mentally impaired at the time of a 1989 murder.

Two relatives of soldiers killed in Turkey's Kurdish insurgency set themselves on fire in an Istanbul cemetery Thursday, during a protest against the government's decision to delay executing a Kurdish rebel leader. Onlookers rushed to aid the pair--the mother of a slain army lieutenant and the brother of another killed soldier--beating the flames with jackets and rolling the two on the ground to try to put out the fire.

Days after saying he favored DNA testing to ensure certainty in some death penalty cases, Texas Gov. George W. Bush said Wednesday he would likely grant his first stay of execution during more than five years as governor. During campaign stops in New Mexico and Arizona, the presumed Republican presidential nominee said he was "inclined" to grant a 30-day reprieve to convicted murderer and rapist Ricky Nolen McGinn.

President Clinton granted a six-month reprieve Thursday night to a Mexican American inmate from Texas who was just five days away from becoming the first federal prisoner executed since 1963. The president said he ordered the reprieve for Juan Raul Garza to give the Justice Department time to study "racial and geographic disparities in the federal death penalty system."

Hoping to block California's next scheduled execution, defense attorneys handling a 16-year-old murder case unveiled new evidence Thursday they say suggests Thomas Martin Thompson is innocent of rape and possibly even the killing that put him on death row. Thompson's attorneys filed a petition with the state Supreme Court asking that his Aug. 5 execution be delayed and calling for a new hearing into the 1981 murder of Ginger Fleischli in Orange County.

The machinery of the state's execution process slammed to a halt Monday, just six hours before Thomas M. Thompson's scheduled death, when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the 1981 Laguna Beach rape and murder case that landed the convict on death row. A day after the U.S.

Tensions between the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court have run high ever since the execution five years ago of Robert Alton Harris, the first person executed in California after a 25-year hiatus. Ninth-Circuit judges issued so many last-minute rulings to stop Harris' death that the high court, incensed, took the extraordinary step of ordering the judges in the middle of the night to butt out of the case.

A Los Angeles federal judge on Wednesday stayed the execution of convicted triple-murderer Horace Kelly, a day after he was denied a hearing by the California Supreme Court. The order by Chief U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. opens the door for Kelly's defense lawyers to challenge the fairness of his state court trials and renew their claims that he should not be put to death because he is insane. State prosecutors immediately appealed Hatter's order to the U.S.

A federal appeals court issued a stay of execution Tuesday for triple murderer Horace Kelly and ordered a hearing in his case for late July. Kelly, 38, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection July 7 for the 1984 murders of two women and an 11-year-old boy in the Inland Empire. Last week, however, a majority of the 21 judges in the U.S.