White TX Authorities All Set to Murder Latino Man Convicted for Murder of White Cop. White Judge Denied Request to Delay Execution Despite Claims of False Expert Testimony and a Racist Juror
/From [HERE] A Latino man convicted of fatally shooting a Dallas police officer in 2007 is scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday in Huntsville.
Wesley Lynn Ruiz, 43, was sentenced to death in July 2008 for the slaying of Mark Nix after a high-speed chase through West Dallas. Nix leapt out of his squad car, ran to the car where Ruiz hid and swung his baton repeatedly at the front passenger window to break it. The officer had just managed a small hole in the window when Ruiz fired one gunshot from inside the vehicle, killing Nix.
Ruiz filed a motion last week to halt the execution, saying prosecutors violated his constitutional rights when they allowed an expert to give false testimony. He also argued some jurors harbored racial bias against him, according to court records. Ruiz is Hispanic. The motion was denied Friday by Judge David C. Godbey in the U.S. Northern District of Texas.
Ruiz recently filed a lawsuit with two other death row inmates that alleged Texas plans to use expired, unsafe drugs for executions in violation of state law. A University of South Carolina pharmacology professor who reviewed state records said some pentobarbital vials were more than 630 days old and others were more than 1,300 days old. Their beyond use date limit is 24 hours when stored at room temperature, and 45 days if such compounded drugs are frozen.
Prison officials denied the allegations and said the state’s pentobarbital supply is safe. A civil court sided with the inmates, but Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, saying the case should be decided by a criminal court, not a civil one. The state’s high court agreed.
One of the three inmates, Robert Fratta, was put to death last month. Ruiz’s attorney, Shawn Nolan, did not respond to a request for comment.
Ruiz hasn’t denied that he fired the shot that killed Nix, a 33-year-old senior corporal. But he argued during his capital murder trial he acted in self-defense and he feared for his life because he thought police shot at the car where he hid.
Jurors deliberated about three hours before they rejected Ruiz’s argument. The same jury then sentenced him to die. [MORE]