Texas Court Delays Execution
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has postponed the execution of murderer Tracy Lane Beatty due to the corona virus. Blake Holland of KLTV reports that Beatty was scheduled to be executed today for the 2003 murder of his 62-year-old mother. The Texas Daily Independent reported that Beatty had previous convictions for drug possession, theft, weapons possession, a brutal assault against a child under two years of age, and prior assaults against his mother, a correctional officer, and others. While incarcerated, Beatty had a physical altercation with a corrections officer and was found with a shank. He had also joined a prison gang.


Raymond Mata is very justly sentenced to death for the murder of 3-year-old Adam Gomez. (I have reserved the stomach-turning facts for the end of the post.) He has the right to government-paid counsel to make his defense, but shouldn’t the government insist on some kind of threshold of non-frivolousness before it forks over taxpayers dollars? Do we really need to pay for complete garbage? That is exactly what Nebraskans have paid for in Mata’s latest petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.