(Washington) An American sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer was executed on Wednesday in Texas, despite suspicions of racial prejudice that tainted his trial.
Wesley Ruiz, a 43-year-old Hispanic man, received a lethal injection in Huntsville Penitentiary and was pronounced dead Wednesday at 6:41 p.m. local time. He is the fourth convict executed since the beginning of the year in the United States.
“I’m ready to go,” he said before his execution.
In 2007, in Dallas, he was chased by police who suspected his vehicle of being involved in a homicide.
At the end of a chase, he had fired a shot at a policeman who was trying to break the window of his car with his truncheon. The bullet had killed this agent.
During his trial, Wesley Ruiz had claimed to have feared for his life and shot in a gesture of “self-defense”, recalls the local press. The jurors still condemned him to the death penalty.
In the following years, his lawyers unsuccessfully brought several appeals to challenge the sentence.
As the date of the execution approached, they filed an emergency motion, arguing that the jurors had relied on “openly racist” material and “clearly hostile stereotypes against Hispanics” in assessing the death. dangerousness of Mr. Ruiz.
One of the jurors had described him as an “animal”, “a mad dog” and considered that the Hispanics present at the trial were “gang members”, they pleaded in court documents.
Their appeal was dismissed at first instance, on appeal and had been sent to the United States Supreme Court.
Wesley Ruiz had also joined a lawsuit brought by several death row inmates in Texas, who accuse the State Corrections Service of allowing the expiry date of lethal substances used in executions to expire.
According to them, this risks causing unlawful suffering, since the Constitution prohibits “inhumane punishments”.
The authorities assure that their stocks of pentobarbital do not pose a problem.
