Texas To Execute Mexican National Ramiro Hernández Despite Appeals From Foreign Affairs Ministry

Mexico’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that it had exhausted all recourses to stop the execution of 45-year-old Mexican citizen Ramiro Hernández, according to Reuters. Hernández, who was convicted of beating his employer to death with a metal bar and raping the man’s wife at knifepoint in 1997 in south Texas, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas at 6pm on Wednesday. The execution will proceed despite allegations of irregularities in the trial from human rights groups, who say the conviction relied on racial stereotypes and testimony from a discredited psychiatrist. The groups also protest that Hernández is mentally retarded, which would make his execution illegal.

A temporary stay of the execution had been granted in early April by a federal judge who ordered the state of Texas to provide lawyers representing Hernández and other prisoner on death row with information about the barbiturates which the state planned to use to put them to death. That stay was reversed this week by an appeals court. Mexico’s El Informador writes that Hernández’s family members, who say he had undergone a religious conversion since his imprisonment, said he appeared “spiritually ready” for his execution.

CNN notes that Hernández would become the second Mexican national to be executed by the state of Texas in less than three months. 46-year-old Edgar Tamayo Arias, who was convicted of shooting and killing a Houston police officer in 1994, was executed in late January. His case was one of 50 which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered the United States to review in a 2004 decision which found American officials had not allowed representatives from the Mexican consulate to meet with detained suspects to discuss their rights.