Illegal immigrant from Honduras executed in Texas

[August 08, 2008]  HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) -- Pleas from an illegal immigrant from Honduras who claimed he was unfairly denied legal help from his consulate when he was arrested for a robbery-murder near Dallas weren't enough to spare him from the death chamber.

The execution Thursday evening of Heliberto Chi, 29, was the second capital punishment case in Texas this week to focus on rights of foreigners under international treaties.

"God forgive them," Chi said from the gurney. "Receive my spirit."

With a tear at the corner of his right eye, he told a cousin watching through a window that he loved him, then whispered in Spanish what appeared to be a prayer as the drugs were taking effect.

Nine minutes later, Chi was pronounced dead.

Two sons of his victim, watching through a window in an adjacent room, stood stoically. Chi had glanced at them only briefly as they and other witnesses were assembling and never addressed them.

Chi murdered his former boss, Armand Paliotta, 56, during a 2001 robbery at an Arlington men's clothing store where Chi had once worked as a tailor. An employee was wounded trying to run away and another hid among clothing racks and called 911 for help.

Chi went on the run with his 18-year-old pregnant girlfriend. She turned him in in California about six weeks later for assaulting her and told authorities he was wanted for murder in Texas.

Chi claimed his treaty rights were violated when he was extradited to Texas because he wasn't advised to contact the Honduran consulate for legal help.

On Tuesday, Mexican-born killer Jose Medellin unsuccessfully raised similar claims. His execution was delayed nearly four hours before the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal. Four of the nine justices dissented.

On Thursday, the high court rejected Chi's appeal without dissent, ruling about 2 1/2 hours before his scheduled execution time.

Unlike Medellin, executed for participating in the gruesome gang rape and murders of two teenage Houston girls 15 years ago, Chi was not among some 50 death row inmates around the country, all Mexican-born, whom the International Court of Justice said should have new hearings in U.S. courts to determine whether the 1963 Vienna Convention treaty was violated during their arrests.

President Bush asked states to review those cases and legislation to implement the process was introduced recently in Congress, but the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year neither the president nor the international court could force Texas to wait.

Chi's attorneys argued that unlike the Vienna Convention obligations with Mexico, the 1920s-era U.S. Bilateral Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Consular Rights with Honduras was specifically between the U.S. and Honduras and was self-executing, meaning it didn't require legislation to have effect. They said the treaty also conferred individual rights and incorporated international law into enforceable domestic law.

Terry O'Rourke, a lawyer on Chi's legal team who teaches international law at Houston's University of St. Thomas, said he was saddened Texas was violating international law to execute Chi.

"It takes you back to a very ugly time in history in Texas when we killed people because of the color of their skin and their poverty," he said.

Chi was set to die in September, but his execution was stopped because the Supreme Court was looking into whether lethal injection procedures were unconstitutionally cruel. When the justices this year upheld the method as proper, his date was reset for Thursday.

The getaway driver at the murder scene, Hugo Sierra, who is the brother of Chi's girlfriend, is serving a life prison term.

Chi was the sixth person executed this year in the nation's busiest death penalty state. Four other Texas prisoners are set to die this month, including two more next week.

[Associated Press; By MICHAEL GRACZYK]

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