Bush will probably issue an Executive pardon!

Execution set for Mexican-born Texas inmate who set off international dispute
The Associated Press

Monday, May 5th 2008, 1:29 PM

HOUSTON — A Mexican-born Texas prisoner whose death sentence set off an international dispute and a U.S. Supreme Court rebuke of the White House received an execution date Monday.

Judge Caprice Cosper set the Aug. 5 lethal injection for 33-year-old Jose Medellin for his participation in the gang rape and strangulation deaths of two teenage girls 15 years ago.

The Supreme Court in March refused to hear Medellin's appeal, saying President George W. Bush overstepped his authority when he ordered Texas to reopen his case and the cases of 50 other Mexican nationals condemned for murders in the United States.

Texas refused to comply.

Lawyers for Medellin and the Mexican government urged her to delay setting the execution date.

"This is a case whose effects go far beyond this courtroom," Medellin's attorney, Sandra Babcock, said.

During Bush's six-year tenure as Texas governor, 152 inmates went to the state's death chamber, the nation's busiest.

But the president took the side of Medellin and 50 other Mexican nationals on death rows around the U.S. after an international court ruled in 2004 their convictions violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country's consular officials.

The International Court of Justice, also known as the world court, said the Mexican prisoners should have new court hearings to determine whether the violation affected their cases.

The White House agreed, but the Supreme Court said Texas could ignore the international court.

Defense lawyers, warning that Americans abroad could be in legal jeopardy if Medellin was executed, wanted the legal adviser to the Mexican foreign minister to speak. Cosper refused.

Roe Wilson, assistant Harris County district attorney, said state and federal courts had reviewed Medellin's case and that Medellin had been given "the right of every American citizen."

Medellin is among 14 native Mexicans on death row in Texas.

Mexico has no death penalty and sued the U.S. in the world court in 2003.

Mexico and other opponents of capital punishment have sought to use the world court to fight for foreigners facing execution in the U.S.

Monday's order makes Medellin at least the sixth inmate in Texas to be scheduled to die in the coming months.

Capital punishment around the nation was on a de facto hold for about seven months until the Supreme Court last month ruled in a Kentucky case that lethal injection was not unconstitutionally cruel.

Medellin was convicted in the June 1993 torture, rape and strangling of two Houston teenagers.

Their bodies were found four days after they failed to return from a friend's house, had been attacked as they took a shortcut along some railroad tracks and stumbled on a group drinking beer after initiating a new gang


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