Thread: Houston: Medellin set to die Aug. 5 for slaying | Elizabeth Pena, Jennifer Ertman

This is the clown that jorge boosh wanted to spare his life in texas and the Supreme court SAID NO the the international court

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5754802.html

Medellin set to die Aug. 5 for Ertman-Peña slayings
By DALE LEZON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle May 5, 2008, 2:36PM
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A Houston man who was convicted of capital murder for the gang rape and slaying of two teenage girls received a death date today after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for his and other killers' executions.

Jose Medellin, 33, is set to die by injection on Aug. 5 for the 1993 murders of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Peña, 16.

The girls were beaten, raped and killed after they happened upon a drunken midnight gang initiation rite in T.C. Jester Park in northwest Houston.

State District Judge Caprice Cosper set the date in a hearing today. Medellin originally was sentenced to die in 1994.

Medellin, who was born in Mexico but lived most of his life in Houston, had exhausted his appeals, but a legal struggle over international law had kept his case on appeal to the Supreme Court.

Even President Bush had said Texas should reconsider the case, based on the 1963 Vienna Convention. That international agreement established ground rules under which countries must treat the citizens of other nations that signed it, including contacting the embassies of foreign nationals without delay.

But the high court ruled in March that President Bush had overstepped his bounds in 2005 when he ordered Texas and other states to conduct hearings for 51 Mexican nationals on death row, including Medellin, who claimed their rights were violated when local consulates were not notified of their arrests.

By a 6-3 vote, the court said that a memo by Bush instructing states to comply with the World Court decision for new hearings was not sufficient to require states to act.

A few days after he wrote the memo, Bush withdrew the United States from the part of an international treaty that gives the World Court final say in international disputes.

The Supreme Court removed another impediment to the execution of Medellin and others when it ruled in April on a Kentucky case that lethal injection is not cruel and unusual punishment.

Kentucky uses the same lethal three-drug cocktail that is used in Texas and 35 other states. Defense attorneys argued that it violated inmate's constitutional rights.

Executions were halted in September when the high court agreed to hear the Kentucky case.

dale.lezon@chron.com

Moving to Americans Killed by Illegals forum.