Supreme Court blocks another Texas execution

For the second time in a week, the Supreme Court intervened in the final hours to block a planned execution in Texas.

Cleve Foster, a 47-year-old former Army recruiter, was scheduled to die for the rape and murder of a woman he met at a Fort Worth bar in 2002. Foster has maintained that another man who was with him at the bar committed the crime.

The high court issued a stay of execution Tuesday and said it wanted more time to decide whether to hear Foster’s appeal.

Twice this year, the court stopped Foster’s execution because of a dispute involving the drugs to be used for the lethal injection.

Last week, the high court blocked the execution of Duane Buck, a convicted murderer from Houston who contended that prosecutors wrongly used his race to persuade the jury to give him a death sentence rather than life in prison.

The last-minute stays of execution in the Texas cases came two weeks after Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he was confident his state had a fair and clear process for deciding who should die for their crimes.