Texas Executes Mexican Man for Murder

Discussion in 'Politics' started by garrison68, Jan 23, 2014.

  1. Texas gets it right.

    Texas Executes Mexican Man for Murder

    By MANNY FERNANDEZ JAN. 22, 2014
    New York Times

    AUSTIN, Tex. - 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.

    Tamayo, who killed a police officer, was not told of his right to call his consulate after his arrest.Texas Prepares to Execute Mexican Despite Concerns That His Arrest Violated LawJAN. 21, 2014

    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.

    Mr. Tamayo had seemed resigned to his fate. In a holding cell, he told a spokesman for the state's prison agency earlier in the day that he was “ready to go,” adding, “Twenty years is too long.”

    A human rights commission that is an arm of the Organization of American States urged the United States last week to halt the execution and grant Mr. Tamayo's case the review the World Court had ordered. Meanwhile, Mr. Kerry and State Department officials expressed concerns to Texas officials that executing Mr. Tamayo would complicate the United States' ability to help Americans overseas. The Vienna Convention helps ensure that United States citizens who are detained in other countries have access to food, medical care and legal representation.

    “If we ourselves don't uphold those obligations, it will make it much harder for us to ask other countries to do so,” a State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said Tuesday.

    Mr. Tamayo was convicted of killing Guy P. Gaddis, the Houston police officer who apprehended him and another man in January 1994 after a robbery. Mr. Tamayo, who was in the United States illegally, pulled out a pistol in the back of the patrol car and shot him three times. Officer Gaddis was 24, and four days before his death, he had learned that he was going to be a father.

    Members of the officer's family watched Mr. Tamayo's execution. “Three times shot in the back of the head for simply doing his job as a police officer,” said Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers' Union. “That's how his life ends. It's time for that sentence to be carried out.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/texas-executes-mexican-for-murder.html?_r=0
     
  2. You think the threat of death dissuades people from making irrational decisions? That, with the fact our justice system is massively flawed make the death penalty a joke..
     
  3. A murderer who has received the death penalty will not kill again. It's also about justice. The biggest "joke" regarding the death penalty is how long it takes to carry it out, in most cases, which is a flaw in the system.
     
  4. Could always cut the fools hands off can't say he'd be pulling much of anything knowing feet would be next if he decided to kill someone again..Let's start docking body parts ya know??What good is gouged out eyes to a pedophile or a limbless murderer? Seeing as an eye for an eye is a little to much for most peoples feelings
     
  5.  
    Meh. I dont trust the state with much, yet alone the death penalty.. I know you think places like jail and Guantanamo are like vacations.. but if you really want to make a person suffer the best medicine is probably rotting in a jail the rest of their lives. 
     
  6. No I don't want to make them "suffer the best medicine", they should be put to death quickly and painlessly - which is far better for them than the crimes people on death row are usually convicted of.
     
  7.  
    Aww garrison that's kinda sweet! 
     
  8. ....I know I don't like my tax dollars supporting confessed/repeat/serial killers.
     
    here...how about we make it more humane..
    [​IMG]
     
  9. It's not "sweet", these people are garbage and should be disposed of, not kept alive at the expense of the taxpayers.

    I respect the opinion of those who are against the death penalty, and the same is true of pacifists, isolationists, etc. I just don't happen to think like them, for these issues.
     
  10. Sounds like Sharia Law to me.....

    Sent from the back of a fat donkey....
     
  11. Burying people in sand up to the neck, and stoning them - for such crimes as having sex, blasphemy, etc., as well as other tortures and unjust executions in places under Islamic rule. We just execute a few murderers, who usually get cared for very nicely during their remaining time in prison, at the taxpayers' expense, as their lawyers appeal their verdict(s) for decades.
     
  12. Didn't read thread at all but goodSent from my SCH-R720 using Grasscity Forum mobile app
     
  13.  
    An eye for an eye which you are claiming as justice earlier in the thread is the whole basis of Sharia Law. 
     
  14. I think serial rapist and child molesters should be put to death too... That's not eye for an eye. It's the point that some people jeopardize our ways of life. and those people should no longer live. Our gov't needs to do a better job of making sure it is done swiftly rather than them sit in jail for 20+ years. 
     
  15. Strangely, it actually costs more to execute a prisoner than to keep them incarcerated for life.
     
    http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29552692/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/execute-or-not-question-cost/#.UuEzTjPnYdU
    http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost
     
    I have mixed feelings about the death penalty, many of which stem from the cost of it.
     
  16. For killing a mob pawn? Makes sense I guess. 
     
  17. So its wrong for him to murder, but murdering him is okay?

    Why? Because its compartmentalized?
     
  18. #18 loopster, Jan 24, 2014
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 24, 2014
    As most conservative states will probably say ammunition costs 1/10ths of that idk why they need to make it a big deal and do it properlyLet's just pump him full of some RX UNTIL we get a good combo case and point An ohio man suffered for 30 mins before he actually died http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2014/01/ohio-mans-execution-takes-25-minutes-sparking-controversy.html"McGuire was put to death for the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of Joy Stewart, who was 30 weeks pregnant at the time of her murder. At 22, Stewart was a newlywed."So let's say he's been in jail for 15 years thats $900k we had to spend to keep a murderer alive when there's a $10 bullet or a free knife and a hot plate to cauterize the amputated limbsLet society show that scum why he shouldn't have done that public humiliation
     
  19. I do not feel that it is wrong for the society, through the state, to kill people who have taken the lives of innocent people, or committed other heinous crimes.
     
  20. For what reason? Is his life is now worth less because of his actions?
     

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