ANGOLA, La. -- A U.S. district court judge Thursday halted the planned execution of convicted cop-killer Dalton Prejean, who escaped his ninth date with the state's electric chair.
Judge Donald Walter gave no reason for the stay.
'Application for stay of execution is granted, 'and that petitioner's execution is hereby stayed pending further order of this court,' Walter wrote in the order.
Prejean, 30, was scheduled to die early Friday for the July 2, 1977, murder of state trooper Donald Cleveland, the first Louisiana trooper to be killed in the line of duty. It would have been the first execution in Louisiana in 1989.
Prejean, then 17, his brother, Joseph, and two friends had left a night club in Lafayette Parish in a 1966 Chevy driven by Dalton Prejean after drinking in several bars. Cleveland, who was on his way to work, pulled the car over because the tail lights were not working.
Dalton Prejean, who had no driver's license, switched places with his brother but Cleveland saw the switch and pushed Joseph Prejean up against the car to search him.
Dalton Prejean told his friends, 'I don't like the way he's doing my brother.' He took a .38 revolver from under the seat, hid it against his leg as he approached Cleveland and shot him twice in the face and chest. The teenagers then raced away.
The shooting was reported to police by a man who gave police a description by CB radio. The quartet was arrested a few hours later.
Prejean had been released from a reform school six months earlier where he had been sent for 30 months for killing a cab driver when he was 14.
He has been on death row 10 years -- longer than any other inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Efforts by Prejean's attorneys to halt the execution in the oaken electric chair were rebuffed at the state Appeals and Supreme Court levels Wednesday.
Prejean, a black, was convicted by an all-white jury. His attorneys tried to argue before the the U.S. Supreme Court that he was only 17 at the time of the shooting but the high court refused to hear the appeal.
The court ruled in June it was constitutional for states to execute a 16- or 17-year-old.
The state Pardon Board also was scheduled to meet Thursday to consider a reprieve, said Kay Kirkpatrick, a member of Gov. Buddy Roemer's legal staff.
Roemer, who was in Hawaii Thursday addressing a national educational conference, told Lt. Gov. Paul Hardy he did not want the execution halted if all other appeals failed.
'From what the governor has indicated to me, he would not have done anything unless something would come up unexpectedly,' Hardy said. 'At this time, I have no preconceived attitude to act in any way contradictory to what Roemer would have done.'
While in the Lafayette Parish jail awaiting trial, Prejean met and married a young girl who bore him a son, Dalton Jr., in April 1980. In a 1980 interview, Prejean said the child was the best reason he had for wanting to live.
'I'll tell him all the things I want to tell him,' he said. 'I'll tell him there's nothing on street corners but trouble. And I'll tell him he's got to stay away from bad company.
'If I can keep him from following me here, that's reason enough to live, don't you think?'
