Texas Invokes Rules of White Supremacy to Ignore World Court: Mexican [non-white] Man Executed for Murdering [White] Police Officer [victim]

Since 1977, the overwhelming majority of death row defendants (81%) have been executed for killing white victims, although whites make up only 50% percent of all homicide victims. [MORE] and [MORE]. Texas is one of the states in the "Death Belt" - the southern states that together account for over 90% of all executions carried out since 1976. These states overlap considerably with the southern states that had the highest incidence of extra-legal violence and killings during the Jim Crow era. [MORE] 

From [HERE] Despite opposition from the State Department, Mexican officials and Latino advocates, Texas executed Edgar Arias Tamayo on Wednesday night, putting to death a Mexican citizen whose case raised questions about the state’s duty to abide by international law.

Mr. Tamayo, 46, was strapped to a T-shaped gurney in the state’s death chamber at a prison in Huntsville, injected with a lethal dose of the sedative known as pentobarbital and pronounced dead at 9:32 p.m. Mr. Tamayo was the 509th inmate executed by Texas in the past three decades and had been one of 21 foreign citizens on its death row.

The case became an international issue that Mexican officials and Secretary of State John Kerry said threatened to strain relations between the two countries. Mr. Tamayo’s arrest in Houston in 1994 on charges of murdering a police officer violated the international treaty known as the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The authorities neglected to tell him of his right under the Vienna Convention to notify Mexican diplomats.

In executing Mr. Tamayo, Texas officials disregarded an international court’s order that his case be reviewed to determine what impact the violation of his consular rights had on his conviction. That decision, made in 2004 by the World Court, the top judicial body of the United Nations, was binding on the United States under international law, Mr. Kerry had told Texas officials. No United States court had given Mr. Tamayo such a review.

Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, had argued that the state was not directly bound by the World Court’s decision, a position backed up by rulings by the United States Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Mr. Tamayo was the third Mexican citizen that Texas had executed whose case was part of the World Court’s order.

“The international outcry about this, Texas’ third illegal execution of a Mexican national and the first without any review whatsoever of the consular assistance claim, is unprecedented,” Mr. Tamayo’s lawyers, Sandra L. Babcock and Maurie Levin, said in a statement.

Hours before the execution, Mr. Tamayo and his lawyers were awaiting rulings on two appeals before the Supreme Court. One claimed Mr. Tamayo was mentally disabled and ineligible for the death penalty. The other argued that the impact of the denial of Mr. Tamayo’s consular rights needed to be assessed by a court. The Supreme Court refused to stay the execution, but it was delayed a few hours while the justices considered his appeals. [MORE]