Texas executes Mexican national despite appeal

The state of Texas on Wednesday executed Mexican national Ramiro Hernández-Llanas with a lethal injection of pentobarbital, despite appeals from attorneys and the Mexican government that the state did not meet international obligations concerning the treatment of detained foreign nationals.

Hernández-Llanas, 44, was convicted in 2000 of bludgeoning former Baylor University history professor Glen Lich to death with a metal bar and repeatedly raping Lich's wife. He is the sixth person to be put to death by Texas this year and the 514th since the United States reinstated capital punishment in 1977.

A federal court last week granted Hernández-Llanas and another death row inmate, Tommy Lynn Sells, a stay of execution, arguing that Texas needed to provide information about the supplier of the lethal injection drug. The state had argued that it was protecting the company from threats of violence.

On Monday, a federal appeals court sided with Texas, saying that the state’s procedures did not violate protections provided by the U.S. Constitution, thus paving the way for Hernández-Llanas’s execution. His attorneys did not appeal the decision to the Supreme Court because the high court last week rejected the same request from Sells’ attorneys.

Mexican government officials say Hernández-Llanas was not advised of his consular rights when he was arrested — a violation of a 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands. But the following year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that only Congress could require states to follow the international court’s rulings.

Defense attorneys had also disputed the testimony of a psychiatrist during Hernández-Llanas’s 2000 trial, who told jurors the defendant was not mentally impaired and would likely commit future acts of violence. Dr. James Grigson, who had never examined the defendant, according to Amnesty International, said during his testimony that Hernández-Llanas was a sociopath who lacked a conscience.

“Testimony like Dr. Grigson’s has been discredited over the years as ‘junk science,’ and he himself was reprimanded and then expelled from the American Psychiatric Association because of his resort to such unscientific testimony in capital trials,” Rob Freer, Amnesty International researcher of the USA, said in a statement.

In January, the Mexican government filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court condemning the “defamatory stereotyping of the functional abilities of persons raised in Mr. Hernandez’s low socio-economic, Mexican culture,” according to Amnesty.

Several times over the past decade, Hernández-Llanas’s has scored between the 50s and 60s on IQ tests. But during his appeals, his attorneys were unsuccessful in arguing that his mental impairment made him ineligible for the death penalty.

While awaiting trial on another crime in Texas, Hernández-Llanas allegedly slashed another inmate in the face, and he was found in prison with homemade weapons.

"This is exactly why we have the death penalty," Lucy Wilke, an assistant Kerr County district attorney who helped prosecute Hernández-Llanas, told the Associated Press this week. "Nobody, even prison guards, is safe from him."

With wire services