UPDATED ON:
Friday, August 08, 2008
05:38 Mecca time, 02:38 GMT
 
News Americas
Texas executes another foreigner

Chi was executed by lethal injection [GALLO/GETTY]

The US state of Texas has executed a Honduran man who had said his rights were violated after his arrest for murder in the US.

Heliberto Chi, 29, was pronounced dead at 23:25 GMT after receiving a lethal injection at a death chamber in Huntsville, the Texas department of criminal justice said in a statement on Thursday.

The execution took place after the US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal.

Chi, who was living in the US illegally, shot his former boss dead and wounded a colleague in 2001 during a robbery in the Texan city of Dallas.

The move comes only two days after another non-US citizen, Mexican-born Jose Medellin, was executed late on Tuesday night for his role in the gang-rape and murder of two teenage girls, also in Texas, in 1993.

'Violating international law'

Chi's lawyers said he should have been told that he could get legal assistance from the Honduran consulate when he was arrested in California and extradited to Texas to face charges of killing his former boss at a men's clothing store.

The failure to do so, they say, was a violation of international law.

However Chi, unlike Medellin, was not among around 50 death row inmates across the US, all Mexican-born, whom the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled should get new hearings in US courts to determine whether the 1963 Vienna Convention treaty was violated during their arrests.

George Bush, the US president, has called for the cases affected by the ruling to be reviewed, but the US Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that neither the president nor the ICJ could force the Texan state government's hand.

Sixth this year

The state had argued that upon his arrest, Chi had not immediately identified himself to police as a foreign national.

The Supreme Court rejected Chi's final appeal [GALLO/GETTY]
A judge in Texas had already refused a request from Chi's lawyer to withdraw his execution date until legislation formalising procedures for reviews of death sentence cases involving foreign nationals becomes law.

An appeal seeking to halt Chi's execution - the sixth this year in Texas - was also turned down Thursday by Texas' highest criminal court.

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 procedures were unconstitutionally cruel.

His date was reset for Thursday when the court earlier this year upheld the method as proper.

 Source: Agencies
Feedback Number of comments : 2
 
PATRIOT
Afghanistan
08/08/2008
They got what they deserved.
In the United States and especially Texas, it does not matter where you come from, if you commit murder and are found guilty, you should be put to death. Where these people "Angels" in there countries? I don't think that the United States made these men kill.

Diego
United States
12/08/2008
Humans Rights
So, does Texans even know the definition of "human rights"? That is a clear violation of human rights. We, as humans, cannot put some else to death. Texans are not God! Wake up brother!

 
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