WSWS
The execution of Humberto Leal Garcia, carried out Thursday by the state of Texas, is symptomatic of the deep-going crisis of American capitalist society, characterized by criminality abroad and brutality at home.
Leal, a 38-year-old Mexican citizen who had lived in the US since the age of 2, was strapped to a gurney and injected with lethal drugs. As the deadly mixture entered his blood stream, Leal called out twice, “Viva Mexico!”
He had been convicted and sentenced to death more than 16 years earlier for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl. His case, along with those of 50 other Mexican citizens condemned to death in the US, became the subject of a 2004 International Court of Justice ruling that the cases of all 51 must be reviewed because they had been denied assistance from the Mexican consulate. Under the Vienna Convention, to which Washington is a signatory, consular access is a right granted to all individuals arrested for crimes outside their own country.
In the case of Leal, like those of the other Mexicans on death row, consular access was literally a life-and-death matter, determining whether they comprehended their rights under US law and were provided with competent attorneys, as opposed to, in Leal’s case, a court-appointed lawyer who had repeatedly been suspended and reprimanded for incompetence and ethics violations.
Texas Governor Rick Perry and the US Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 ruling, refused to block the execution, despite appeals by the Obama White House, the Justice Department, the United Nations and the government of Mexico. The UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions and torture justifiably described Leal’s execution as “an arbitrary deprivation of life” and said the conditions to which he had been subjected during the previous 16 years on death row “amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment according to well-established standards in international law.”
As in 2008, when Texas put to death another Mexican national covered by the International Court of Justice ruling, the governor maintained that international courts and international law have no bearing in the state of Texas.
Perry no doubt saw the execution as an asset in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. In this, he was only following in the footsteps of George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton, both of whom demonstratively took time off of their presidential campaigns to oversee judicial murders when the two men were governors.
Leal was the seventh person put to death by the state of Texas this year. It has scheduled eight more executions between now and September.
The United States is the only advanced capitalist country to retain capital punishment, a method of state murder that has been abolished by two-thirds of the world’s countries as a relic of barbarism. It is one of the top five in terms of executions, along with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
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