Texas Justice System

[kirkAU]

HUNTSVILLE — An illegal immigrant from Honduras who claimed his treaty rights were violated when he was arrested for a robbery-murder near Dallas was executed Thursday evening.

"God forgive them, receive my spirit," Heliberto Chi said in English. In Spanish, he told a friend watching through a window that he loved him and appreciated his hard work. He appeared to be whispering a prayer in Spanish with a tear at the corner of his right eye as the lethal drugs began to take effect.

One of Chi's cousins, who was among the witnesses, sobbed uncontrollably. Two sons of his victims watched through another window and Chi glanced at them briefly but didn't appear to acknowledge them.

Chi was pronounced dead nine minutes later at 6:25 p.m. CDT.

Lawyers for Chi had claimed in appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court that he should have been told he could get legal assistance from the Honduran consulate when he was arrested in California and extradited to Texas to face charges for killing his former boss, Armand Paliotta, at a men's clothing store during a robbery 7 1/2 years ago. Chi had once worked for Paliotta as a tailor at the store in Arlington, between Dallas and Fort Worth.

The Supreme Court, ruling about 2 1/2 hours before his scheduled execution time, rejected his appeal without dissent.

The arguments in his case, focusing on rights of foreigners under international treaty, were similar to those used unsuccessfully Tuesday by lawyers for condemned Texas prisoner Jose Medellin. In that case, the Supreme Court, with four of the nine justices dissenting, rejected his appeal and the Mexican-born Medellin was executed for participating in the gruesome gang rape and murders of two teenage Houston girls 15 years ago.

Unlike Medellin, Chi was not among some 50 death row inmates around the country, all Mexican born, who the International Court of Justice said should have new hearings in U.S. courts to determine whether the 1963 Vienna Convention treaty was violated during their arrests. Mexico had sued in the court on behalf of its citizens condemned in the U.S.

President Bush asked states to review those cases and legislation to implement the process was introduced recently in Congress, but the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year neither the president nor the international court could force Texas to wait.

Chi's attorneys argued that unlike the Vienna Convention obligations with Mexico, the 1927 U.S. Bilateral Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Consular Rights with Honduras was specifically between the U.S. and Honduras and was self-executing, meaning it didn't require legislation to have effect. They said the treaty also conferred individual rights and incorporated international law into enforceable domestic law.

"There can be little doubt that this issue — the proper construction of treaty provisions — is sufficiently meritorious to warrant review," Chi's lawyers said in their Supreme Court request for a reprieve.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's highest criminal court, late Wednesday rejected a similar appeal.

Chi had visited the suburban Dallas store in 2001, then returned after closing and was let in by Paliotta after saying he'd left his wallet behind. Once inside, he pulled out a gun and demanded a money bag.

Paliotta was shot and killed. Another employee was wounded trying to run away and a third hid among clothing racks and called 911 for help. On a recording of the call played at his trial, Chi can be heard calling the hiding employee, in Spanish, to "Come to the front" of the store.

With police on the way, he fled a few minutes later, jumped into a waiting car and sped off.

He was arrested in Reseda, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles, about six weeks later. His 18-year-old pregnant girlfriend had turned him for assaulting her and told authorities he was wanted for murder in Texas. The couple had been on the run, crisscrossing the country.

Terry O'Rourke, a lawyer on Chi's legal team who teaches international law at Houston's University of St. Thomas, said Chi's guilt wasn't the issue.

"Chi is a murderer, Medellin is a murderer," O'Rourke said. "But we don't kill all murderers. We don't execute all murderers. We do it according to the law.

"When your state violates international law to kill somebody, it has very negative consequences."

Chi was set to die last September, but his execution was stopped because the Supreme Court was looking into whether lethal injection procedures were unconstitutionally cruel. When the justices earlier this year upheld the method as proper, his date was reset for Thursday.

The getaway driver at the murder scene, Hugo Sierra, who is the brother of Chi's girlfriend, is serving a life prison term.

Chi would say little about the crime in an interview with The Associated Press shortly before his then-scheduled execution last year.

"My situation is not about being innocent or guilty," he said. "My rights were violated."

"If it's the Lord's will" and he was executed, Chi said he had "great peace in my mind and soul."

Four other Texas prisoners are set to die this month, including two more next week. They're among at least 15 Texas inmates with execution dates in the coming months.

[Tiger Wench]

Four other Texas prisoners are set to die this month, including two more next week. They're among at least 15 Texas inmates with execution dates in the coming months.

Freaking pinkos caused us a backlog.  Gotta clean house.

The arguments in his case, focusing on rights of foreigners under international treaty, were similar to those used unsuccessfully Tuesday by lawyers for condemned Texas prisoner Jose Medellin. In that case, the Supreme Court, with four of the nine justices dissenting, rejected his appeal and the Mexican-born Medellin was executed for participating in the gruesome gang rape and murders of two teenage Houston girls 15 years ago.

That fucker Medellin and the rest of his homies should have died a slow painful death at the hands of the girls' fathers and brothers. 

On June 24, 1993, the girls were at a party at a friend's apartment when they realized the lateness of the hour. Following the railroad tracks through T.C. Jester Park, they concluded, would shave 10 minutes off their trip to Elizabeth's Oak Forest home.

As the girls made their way past a thicket near White Oak Bayou, they stumbled onto the tail end of a drunken gang initiation. When they blundered into the group of youths, Medellin — 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighing just 135 pounds — grabbed Elizabeth and flipped her to the ground. Jennifer, drawn by Elizabeth's scream, turned to help and was herself captured.

As the teens cried and struggled, six gang members took turns raping them.

Finally, gang leader Peter Cantu told Medellin, "We're going to have to kill them."

Gang members Derrick O'Brien and Raul Villarreal looped a belt around Jennifer's throat, pulling with such force that the belt broke. Cantu, Medellin and Efrain Perez strangled Elizabeth with a shoelace. Then they stomped on the girls' throats for good measure.

Four days later, police, acting on a tip from a gang member's brother, found the teens' bodies, badly decomposed in the summer heat.

The victims were identified through dental records.

Judge Cathy Cochran, a member of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which last week rejected his appeals, wrote that Medellin bragged to his friends that the victims had been virgins until they were attacked by the gang.

"His written confession," Cochran wrote, "displayed a callous, cruel and cavalier attitude toward the two girls that he had raped and helped to murder. Surely no juror or judge will ever forget his words or his sordid deeds."

Medellin, who grew up in poverty amid drug abuse and an unstable home environment, twice refused to be interviewed for this story.

But on his Web site, posted by a Canadian anti-death penalty group, he claims: "I'm where I am because I made an adolescent choice. That's it!

"My life is in black and white like old western movies," he wrote. "But unlike the movies, the good guys don't always finish first."

What a fucking fuckhead.  None of the scumbags were older than 19.  One has already gone to hell, two got their sentences commuted to life because they were under 17 when the crime occurred, and now this one got his.  One or two more to go, I think.  As for his claims of Mexican rights, he was born in Mexico BUT CAME TO THE US AS A CHILD, so his worthless ass grew up here and he spoke English. 

I love this part:

(Judge) Cochran, however, disagreed in her appeals court concurrence. "Some societies may judge our death penalty barbaric," she wrote. "Most Texans, however, consider death a just penalty in certain rare circumstances. Many Europeans disagree. So be it."

Texas has rebuffed not only the U.N. and Bush, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and the judicial arm of the Organization of American States, which has demanded Medellin receive a new trial.

Fuck the world courts.  Animals like this do not deserve to live.

Say what you will, and I know not everyone agrees with the death penalty, but I personally have no problem with it and/or the way Texas handles it.  I feel it is neither arbitrary or reckless.