Stay Of Execution for Alabama Prisoner

Four months without an execution in this country....

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) -- A murderer who would have become the nation's first executed inmate in months won a reprieve Thursday from the U.S. Supreme Court a little more than an hour before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection.

James Harvey Callahan, set to die at 6 p.m. CST, was granted a stay, Holman prison warden Grantt Culliver told officers on death row. The Supreme Court's brief order did not detail why it granted the stay.

It would have been the nation's first execution since September, when the high court agreed to consider whether lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. The inmate's attorney had asked the high court to halt the execution after a federal appeals court lifted a stay granted by a Montgomery judge.

Rocky Mountain News