Supreme Court stays Texas execution to allow for Buddhist advisor
(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the scheduled execution of a Texas inmate on Thursday, ordering the state to grant his request to allow a Buddhist spiritual adviser to accompany to him to the death chamber.
The 11th-hour stay was sought for Patrick Murphy, 57, a member of the “Texas 7” group of inmates convicted of killing a police officer at a sporting goods store on Christmas Eve in 2000 after escaping from a maximum-security prison days earlier.
The high court granted the reprieve more than an hour after he had been scheduled to die by lethal injection at the state’s prison facility in Huntsville.
“As this Court has repeatedly held, governmental discrimination against religion — in particular, discrimination against religious persons, religious organizations, and religious speech — violates the Constitution,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the court’s majority opinion.
Murphy’s lawyers filed an appeal with the Supreme Court on Thursday, requesting a stay if Texas was unable to provide him with a Buddhist minister in the execution chamber.
“If a stay is not granted, Murphy will suffer irreparable injury because he will be executed under circumstances that violate his First Amendment and statutory rights to freedom of religion,” David Dow, his lawyer, wrote in the petition.
Texas allows a Christian or Muslim religious adviser for a condemned inmate to be present in either in the execution room or in the adjacent viewing room. But inmates of other religious faiths, such as Murphy, Buddhist, are only allowed to have their religious adviser in the viewing room, Kavanaugh noted.
“In my view, the Constitution prohibits such denominational discrimination,” he wrote.
Murphy was serving a 50-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault when he and six other inmates broke out of maximum- security prison in Kenedy, Texas, on Dec. 13, 2000, according to court documents.
Eleven days later, Murphy and the other escapees robbed a sporting goods store in Irving. Police officer Aubrey Hawkins, 31, was shot and killed by the group as the men fled, according to court filings.
They were apprehended about a month later at a Colorado mobile home park, where one of the escapees committed suicide.
Murphy was sentenced to die in 2003 after he was convicted of capital murder of a police officer.
Murphy was in a vehicle, serving as a lookout and did not shoot Hawkins during the robbery, according to prosecutors. But he was still convicted of murder under the state’s law of parties, a statute that holds a person criminally responsible if they act as an accomplice.
Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by G Crosse and Peter Cooney
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