Mata Executed After Courts Deny Appeals

FLORENCE (AP) - Luis Mata, on death row for the 1977 murder of a Phoenix woman who was nearly decapitated, was executed by injection early yesterday after losing last-minute efforts to delay his punishment.

According to Corrections Department spokesman Scott Smith, Mata's last words, to Corrections Director Terry Stewart, were: ''Tell everyone I'm sorry.''

The execution was scheduled for 12:05 a.m. but was delayed until 12:50 a.m. as courts considered and denied last-minute appeals.

Mata laid his head on the table after the start of the execution was announced. Mata then appeared to begin reciting the Lord's Prayer. After about 15 words, he stopped speaking, his head rolled from side to side, his lips fluttered, his chest heaved several times and was still.

Mata, 45, became the sixth person executed in Arizona since the state in 1992 resumed carrying out capital punishment after a 29-year hiatus.

Both Mata and his brother, Alonzo Mata, were convicted in the March 11, 1977 murder of Debra Lee Lopez.

The brothers raped and killed the 21-year-old woman after a night of drinking, smoking marijuana and shooting up with heroin.

Lopez was stabbed repeatedly and her throat was slashed so severely she was almost decapitated, the medical examiner's report said.

The brothers were convicted of first-degree murder and were sentenced to die. They were resentenced later under changes in Arizona's death penalty law, with Luis getting a death sentence but Alonzo receiving a life term because of mitigating circumstances, including his age at the time, 18.

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday vacated a stay granted on Tuesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Less than two hours later, the state Board of Executive Clemency voted unanimously against clemency for Mata, despite testimony from the condemned man's friends and relatives who said he was retarded, brain-damaged and unfairly sentenced to die.

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 to vacate the stay. In later separate actions, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Arizona Supreme Court refused to block the execution.

Luis Mata's attorneys argued that the judge who first sentenced him to death did not know Mata was born with water on the brain. He suffered further brain damage as a child and was exposed regularly to pesticides as he and his 15 siblings moved around the country as migrant farm workers.

During his clemency hearing yesterday, Mata told the board he did not kill Lopez, but ''if I had been sober ... I would have been able to prevent this, but the way that I was, no.''

Lola Rottman, the victim's mother, testified at the clemency hearing by telephone. She begged the board to carry out the sentence issued in her daughter's murder.

Mata's attorneys said Mata fiished a college course while in prison, and serves as a religious counselor to other inmates.

''This is not in any way, shape or form the same man who was sentenced to death 19 years ago,'' said John Stookey, Mata's attorney. ''If we believe anything, we must believe in redemption.''

However, Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Bob Shutts said after the board's vote that it was irrelevant to consider what Mata is like today.

As the execution neared, about 30 death penalty opponents gathered in a dirt lot across the prison, holding candles and reciting prayers in a circle.

---

Daily Wildcat News Opinions Sports PoliceBeat Comics Mutato