| | |  Americas & Beyond | October 2008 
Bible's 'Right and Wrong' OK for Jury
 Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow
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| | Texas Death Row Inmate Jimmie Lucero - On September 6, 2003, in Potter County, Texas, Lucero entered the home of a neighbor and killed a 74-year-old woman, a 32-year-old woman and a 72-year-old man with a shotgun. Two other family members were also shot, but survived. (Prison Photo) | | |
The Supreme Court has upheld a Texas capital murder conviction, even though a Bible was used in the jury room.
Attorneys representing Jimmie Lucero, an Amarillo man who was given the death penalty for murdering three neighbors with his shotgun in 2003, argued that since the jury foreman read verses from the Bible to encourage hold-out jury members to vote in a certain way, their client's rights were violated. Kelly Shackleford of Liberty Legal Institute believes that is untrue.
"It's an attempt to have the courts come in and tell private citizens that they can't read their Bible or can't have their Bible, and that's not this country," Shackleford says. "They're mixing up the United States of America with something like the USSR or some other totalitarian country."
Quoting Bible verses in a jury room should not make any difference, according to the attorney. "When people are trying to convince one another, they use all kinds of different arguments. And appealing to morals of right and wrong -- the idea that we're going to be worse off as a country for that, I don't think that's what most Americans believe," he adds. "I think we could use a lot more of referring to absolute standards of right and wrong in our juries and in every area of our life."
The two hold-out jurors who changed their votes said the scripture reading, Romans 13:1-6, had nothing to do with that change. |
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