16 May 2002

Mr. Gerald Garrett, Chairman
Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles
P.O. Box 13401
Austin, Texas 78711-3401

To Mr. Gerald Garrett, Chair, and the Members of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles:

I retired as Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, in 1996. I subsequently was appointed by President Nelson Mandela as Chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up by an act of Parliament to take testimonies from the victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses that occurred during the years of the apartheid South African government, and to make recommendations regarding amnesty for those offenses. I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

I presently write you as a pastor and one who has personally struggled for decades with the issues of crime and forgiveness. I write on behalf of Napoleon Beazley, a young African American man who is set to be executed by the State of Texas on May 28, 2002. My plea extends also to his family - his parents, Ireland and Rena Beazley, his sister, Maria Beazley, and his 18-year-old brother, Jamal Beazley, who still lives with his parents. I urge you to hear me also on behalf of Napoleon's grandmothers, other relatives, and the good people of his community, both white and African American, in Grapeland and Crockett, Texas. I have had conversations with Napoleon's parents, and from them I have gleaned that a damaged but resilient, faithful, confessing, and forgiving community awaits your decision in Napoleon's case. Within the community, I believe there is a heartfelt compassion not only for Napoleon, in his dire circumstance, but for the surviving family of John Luttig (Napoleon's victim) for whom the family and community pray regularly.

I am opposed to the death penalty in all cases. I find it incomprehensible that the death penalty should be imposed upon a person who was a child when the offense occurred. My country no longer has the death penalty and has within the Bill of Rights of its new Constitution explicit provisions for the protection of children. Our Bill of Rights affirms that "everyone has the right to life" (Ch. 2, Sec. 11), and that "everyone has the right to freedom and security of the person, which includes the right...not to be treated or punished in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way (Ch. 2, Sec. 12(1)(e)). The Constitution defines "child" as "a person under the age of 18 years." (Ch. 2 Sec. 28(3)). The Constitution bestows upon "every child...the right" to such things as "family care or parental care," to "basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services," and "to be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse or degradation." (Ch. 2, Sec. 28(1)). I hope that you can see why, merely in light of South African law, I am astounded that Texas and a few other states in the United States take children from their families and execute them. Certainly, in most

cases the arrest of the child stems from the perpetration of the crime. But when the State executes the offender now grown to be a young man, it literally takes the child from the parents and siblings. The State forces the innocent family to atone for the death of the victim by causing it unbearable grief. Because I vigorously oppose this assault, not only upon the child but upon the family, I previously have protested the execution of child offenders in Texas (Gary Graham and Joseph Cannon) and Oklahoma (Sean Sellers). Indeed, Texas and Oklahoma are two of only three states that have executed child offenders in close to a decade.

Our new South African Constitution is premised upon the assumption that South Africa will be a constitutional state that respects fundamental human rights. The Constitution concludes with a provision on National Unity and Reconciliation which states that the document lays the foundation for South Africa to transcend its "legacy of hatred, fear, guilt, and revenge." It continues, "[T]here is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization." "Ubuntu" is a central feature of the African world view. It is difficult to translate into English, but it means the very essence of being human. It means that my humanity is bound up in yours. Rather than viewing society as a collection of isolated individuals or groups, ubuntu visualizes it as a place of belonging, participating, sharing. Ubuntu views social harmony as the greatest good. Describing it, I have written elsewhere that "anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good. To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. What dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me. It gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanize them." Although the parents of Napoleon Beazley and the Grapeland community have experienced the vengeance of the Texas justice system, they seem to me full of ubuntu. In protesting Napoleon's execution, they are asserting that they feel uniquely degraded by the potential spectacle of his death. At the same time, they recognize that his crime degraded and dehumanized John and Bobbie Luttig, and constituted an assault on their family. The Grapeland community reminds me of communities in my homeland that suffered great oppression, but during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, truly forgave their tormentors.

Amnesty International released a short report in September 2001, following Napoleon's last execution date, finding that "while there is growing disquiet in the USA about the risk of executing the innocent, there appears to be little equivalent concern for these other 'innocent' victims of the death penalty who live day after day, for years, in the knowledge that their government intends to kill their loved one." The Amnesty report compares the human rights crimes of torture and disappearance to the death penalty in this context, with an illustration from my country. In 1988, parents of those on death row in South Africa wrote the President, "To be a mother or father an watch your child going through this living hell is a torment more painful than anyone can imagine." Finding this situation not to comport with human dignity, my country has abolished the death penalty, both by court decree and legislative act. In an extraordinary attempt to keep the family together, Napoleon's parents have traveled to death row to visit him on almost every weekend since he arrived there in 1995. They struggle to make every day seem normal. The go to work, they return from work, and they raise their remaining child at home, Jamal, who is 18 and whose commencement and graduation exercises from Grapeland High School flank the date that Texas has set to kill his brother. But Ireland and Rena do not have a normal life. Ireland recently had a stint put in one of his arteries to keep it open, responding to a possible physiological effect of stress. Rena has needed to be hospitalized more than once for the anxiety caused by the State's push to kill her son. Maria, Napoleon's sister,

continues to recover from the loss of her scholarship at Rice University and downturn in her life resulting from the offense, the trial, and the shock of seeing her previously vibrant brother condemned to death. Recently, Jamal had to be convinced by his friends to go on his senior trip. Friends are trying to convince him that, however horrible his future may be, he must go on as though his life is normal.

Tragically, I have been informed that the State has exacerbated the torment of the Beazley family from the time of the arrest until the present by wrapping its cause in the mantle of the family of John Luttig. From all appearances, the State has adopted the position that it is an agent of the victimized Luttig family. By doing so, it has driven a wedge between the Luttig and Beazley families and between the Tyler and Grapeland/Crockett communities. Amnesty International reports that the prosecutors pushed the co-defendants into testifying against Napoleon by telling them that the family of the victim wanted a victim, and that if they did not cooperate, they would themselves be subject to the death penalty. It reports that, when Napoleon offered to plead guilty in return for a life sentence, the prosecutors refused, asserting that the Luttig family's opposition prevented it. The prosecutors told the jury that the trial was not "about" the defendant, Napoleon, but about the victim and, "on behalf of the Luttig family," the prosecutors thanked the jurors for their verdict. One of them repeatedly called Napoleon an "animal" in direct contrast to the humanity of John Luttig. The oddest thing I saw in the Amnesty report was that, at one point, the prosecutors asked the trial judge if Judge Michael Luttig, the victim's son, could be given an opportunity to help them in the process of picking the jury that would try the young man accused of killing his father.

The State's behavior seems to have undermined the traditionally "retributive" purpose of the punishment in this case, and has turned it into State-facilitated private vengeance. This does no favor to the Luttig family, which may or may not support the execution, but apparently has made few if any public statements about it. It particularly degrades the Luttigs by making them appear bloodthirsty. I have read part of the testimony of Michael, Suzanne, and Elizabeth Luttig from the punishment phase of Napoleon's trial, and although I see enormous pain revealed there, I do not see vindictiveness. This makes me wonder if the Luttigs are not only victims of Napoleon's crime, but also of their own status or social class. Certainly, around the time of trial, the Luttigs could not have been watching the prosecutors' every move. They may not have known at the time that the prosecutors made representations to the trial court suggesting that the family was demanding a death sentence. The prosecutors may have pushed the limits in this case merely because John Luttig's son was a federal appellate judge and they were in awe of his prestige. Whatever their reason, the death sentence may not have originated with the Luttig family, and the Luttig family, therefore, may have been misrepresented even by the defense in the federal court pleadings as raising obstacles to ubuntu. I have not yet succeeded in my efforts to speak to members of the Luttig family.

In its decision holding the death penalty incompatible with the rights to life and dignity enshrined in the new South African Constitution, the Constitutional Court stated in 1995 that, "to be consistent with the value of ubuntu ours should be a society that "wishes to prevent crime...[not] to kill criminals simply to get even with them." It quoted the German Federal Constitutional Court regarding the "prohibition of cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishments": The State "cannot turn the offender into an object of crime prevention to the detriment of his constitutionally protected right to social worth and respect." My country and Germany have both undergone the ordeal of decades-long repressive government. In both countries, during those periods, the powerful exploited the weak with horrible and degrading

punishments. At the end of World War Two, the Nuremberg Tribunals awakened Germans to the atrocities that they had committed. The Germans created a constitution that they hoped would prevent forever the reoccurrence of such things. At the end of our long night in South Africa, I led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where by deliberately and explicitly following ubuntu and the Christian doctrine of forgiveness, we attempted to refresh, enlighten, and record the memory of our nation's people. We hope that on the strength of our Constitution and that memory, the atrocities we suffered during apartheid, including the death penalty, will be stayed forever from returning to visit us.

We South Africans may have found in your Declaration of Independence a historical source for our constitutional right to life. But nothing like it is in America's Constitution. Neither does the "cruel and unusual punishment clause" contain any reference to human dignity. I have observed that discussion in the United States about any particular case flows around the fitness of the death penalty for the particular offender, focusing upon the defendant in relation to the crime. The question does not seem to be addressed whether the punishment itself degrades the dignity of the offender, or that of society itself or any group of persons beyond the condemned man. Even discussions of systemic racism and the death penalty have an abstract character, with the United States Supreme Court having held that it will tolerate a measure of race bias in the application of the death penalty, so long as there is no proof that race played a factor in a specific case. Americans do not seem to think about the concrete, visceral impact that executions have on the African American community in cases like Napoleon's, where there seem to be many indications that race was a factor in his sentencing: the prosecutor's refusal to accept a guilty plea in return for a life sentence (while accepting a plea from a white shooter in return for 45 years in a more heinous case that involved the premeditated killing of a black man on account of his race), the prosecutors' creation of an all-white jury (that included an individual documented to harbor racist sympathies and the local president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy), and the prosecutors' argument at the punishment phase comparing the humanity of the white victim to the "animality" of the defendant (a common racist conceit in apartheid South Africa as in the American South). I beg you to think of the degrading effect of Napoleon's sentence, under such circumstances, on the African American community in general and the Grapeland community and his family in particular.

I think that, if many Americans were asked whether their society had ever been repressive, they would respond with a blank stare. There are subgroups in America, however, that have a strong experiential memory of American repression. The birthplace of liberty was also one of the last remaining bastions of human slavery. When I ask myself how a young African American man like Napoleon Beazley can be at risk of execution in America, when there is evidence that had he been born white or had the victim been of a lower social class, he would not be where he is, I come back to the fact that the United States has never experienced a mandate to change, as the Axis powers did due to loss at war, or the kind of healing discussion that allows for change through reconciliation that South Africa recently has experienced. The opportunity was lost at the end of the American Civil War, when the United States Supreme Court undermined the potency of the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. After the Civil War, lynchings of African Americans flourished and lasted well into the middle of the last century. "Jim Crow" laws flourished. Out of fear, in fact, that full civil rights would be given to African Americans, powerful Senators caused the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s to promise that the United States would never adhere to the powerful human rights instruments that most of the rest of the nations in the world now have adopted. The Supreme Court and the American President

and Congress finally recognized the degradation of segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, taking steps to eliminate it on hundred hears after the emancipation of the slaves by President Lincoln. Because resistance to change in America is so strong and progress is glacial, I think it is hard for many Americans, of all races and backgrounds, to apprehend that, in a variety of ways, America has fallen behind the rest of the world in the protection of fundamental human rights.

The obstinacy of the Smith County District Attorney, who within the last week has set about getting the death penalty against a new child offender, is something with which I lament that I am all too familiar. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in my country, there were members of the apartheid regime who refused to see that the human rights abuses they had committed were wrong or unlawful. The execution of a child offender clearly is such a human rights abuse. I stand assured that the Smith County authorities have been educated on that fact. The Commission was founded on the idea that people have an innate ability to repent and change, and I was astounded by the heartfelt accounts offered by perpetrators of the worst offenses of human rights who were seeking amnesty. I hold out hope for the Smith County District Attorney, for God does not give up on anyone and I have seen remarkable personal transformations. Here is where the Grapeland community's forgiveness serves ubuntu and the law of Christ. True reconciliation involves exposing the truth: the abuse or degradation caused by the other. However, it also involves faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to make a beginning on a new course that will be different from the one that caused the wrong. The Grapeland community, constantly praying for those whom they believe have unfairly treated Napoleon, leaves the door open to that change and reconciliation. At the same time, through letters and other means of appeal, the Grapeland/Crockett Missionary Baptist pastors, the Houston County District Attorney, the ex-death row warden who lives in Grapeland, relatives, friends, and associates of the Beazley family all have recognized the awfulness of Napoleon's crime, its devastating and demeaning effect on the family of John Luttig, and its offense to the peace in Tyler, Texas. In those letters, appeals, and prayers, they reiterate, however, that the punishment is inappropriate for Napoleon, not only because he was a child (their child), but because he is now a young man who, since April 19, 1994, has been remorseful and contrite and has led an upright life in prison as the only way he has known to atone for what he did.

The universal acceptance of the norm against the execution of child offenders is a sign of ubuntu on the level of the world. It goes hand in hand with the development in international human rights declarations and treaties of protections for the integrity of the family unit. As a pastor, I ask this Board to join in the world unity protecting the rights of children, not only against the death penalty, but against forced military conscription, malnutrition, deprivation of housing, and other evils which unfortunately are still suffered by childhood. Spare the child. Spare the family. Spare the community. Spare us all the degradation of the death of another child offender, when by opening the hope of a future for him and his family, you give hope to us all.

I am opposed to a moratorium on the death penalty. Texas instead should abolish it, but not without setting up a commission to take testimony from all affected by it (from the survivors of the victim to the prosecutors to the defendants' families and wardens and jailors) so that its baleful effects may be fully known and the bulwarks of real knowledge and awareness of history may be raised against its return. The task of the law should be to expose, apprehend, and prevent those who commit offenses from undermining the public

good and social fabric. The State should model the common good it wishes its citizens to follow, not behaviors it condemns. The State has apprehended Napoleon, it has held him accountable for his offense, and it has incarcerated him, preventing him if he were disposed from committing another offense. I feel certain that he is not so disposed. If the State of Texas kills Napoleon Beazley, nothing good will come of it. Texas appears to be headed toward a harsh period of executions. The troubled cases that come before you, like Napoleon's, will proliferate. With your recommendation to the Governor in these cases, you are the final guarantors of the common good. I trust that you are people of conscience, and for this reason I pray for your courage. I humbly plead with you to spare the life of Napoleon Beazley, the integrity of his family, and the hope of his community for a more just society.

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