Court Nixes Appeal After Granting Execution Stay

(CN) - The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to rehear the case of an Army veteran on death row whom the justices granted an 11th-hour reprieve last week.

Cleve Foster had been scheduled for execution death row in Texas won a last-minute stay of execution on Jan. 11, but a majority of the high court voted that day to grant a stay as they considered granting an appeal.

Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito had dissented last week, stating simply that they would have denied Foster's petition.

Foster, 47, was one of two men convicted in the February 2002 rape and murder of a woman they met in a bar. The 5th Circuit rejected Foster's appeal in an unsigned March opinion.

That ruling describes how Foster and Sheldon Ward met Nyanuer "Mary" Pal at a bar in Fort Worth, Texas, where all three were regular patrons. Pal and the men left the bar separately, and Pal's nude body was found eight hours later in a ditch far off a road in Tarrant County. She had been raped and shot in the head.

Ward eventually confessed having some role in the crime to authorities, but he never implicated Foster, who has maintained his innocence throughout the case.

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