A Honduran who killed his former boss and wounded an employee was scheduled to be executed yesterday evening, which would make him the second foreign national executed in Texas this week.
Heliberto Chi was in the US illegally at the time of the 2001 slaying. Lawyers for the Central American country said the fact that Chi was not permitted to contact anyone from his government after he was arrested in California and extradited to Texas was a violation of an international treaty.
The argument is similar to the one raised earlier this week by another condemned Texas prisoner, Mexican-born Jose Medellin, who was executed late on Tuesday night for his part in the gruesome gang rape-slayings of two teenage Houston girls 15 years ago.
Unlike Medellin, however, Chi was not among some 50 death row inmates around the country — all Mexican born — who the International Court of Justice ruled should get new hearings in US courts to determine whether the 1963 Vienna Convention treaty was violated during their arrests. That ruling was prompted by Mexico suing the US in the world court in 2003.
While Medellin’s case was being considered on Tuesday by the US Supreme Court, a judge in Texas refused a request from Chi’s lawyer to withdraw Chi’s execution date until legislation formalizing procedures for reviews of capital cases involving foreign nationals becomes law.
Chi, 29, was spared the death chamber last September when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stopped his scheduled punishment after the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel.
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