Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas

TEXAS – EXECUTION – RAMIRO HERNANDEZ LLANAS EXECUTED 6:28 PM

april 9, 2014

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A man who escaped prison in his native Mexico while serving a murder sentence was executed in Texas on Wednesday for fatally beating a former Baylor University history professor and attacking his wife more than 16 years ago.

Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, 44, was lethally injected in the state’s death chamber in Huntsville.

He was in the U.S. illegally when he was arrested for the October 1997 slaying of 49-year-old Glen Lich. Just 10 days earlier, Lich had given Hernandez-Llanas a job helping with renovations at his ranch near Kerrville, about 65 miles northwest of San Antonio, in exchange for living quarters.

Investigators said Hernandez-Llanas lured Lich from his house, then repeatedly clubbed him with a piece of steel rebar. Armed with a knife, he then attacked Lich’s wife. She survived and testified against Hernandez-Llanas, who also had been linked to a rape and a stabbing.

Strapped to a hospital gurney inside the death chamber, Hernandez-Llanas asked for forgiveness and said he was at peace.

“I’m looking at the angel of God,” he said, speaking in Spanish during a final statement that lasted nearly five minutes. “I ask forgiveness from the family of my boss.”

He raised his head from the gurney three times and blew three loud kisses toward a brother, a sister and two friends watching through a window. He also urged his children to “take advantage of your time on earth.”

As the drug took effect, he snored loudly twice, then appeared to go to sleep. Within seconds, all movement stopped. He was pronounced dead at 6:28 p.m.

Hernandez-Llanas was the second Texas inmate to receive a lethal injection of a new supply of pentobarbital. Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials have refused to identify the source of the powerful sedative, contending secrecy is needed to protect the drug’s provider from threats of violence from capital punishment opponents. The U.S. Supreme Court backed the state’s position in a related case last week.

Texas and other states that have the death penalty have been scrambling for substitute drugs or new sources for drugs for lethal injections after major drugmakers — many based in Europe with longtime opposition to the death penalty — stopped selling to prisons and corrections departments.

Hernandez-Llanas’ appeals were exhausted, and the Texas parole board on Tuesday refused to delay his death sentence or commute it to life in prison.

Hernandez-Llanas was among more than four dozen Mexican citizens awaiting execution in the U.S. when the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled in 2004 that they weren’t properly advised of their consular rights when arrested. A measure mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court to enforce that ruling has languished in Congress.

Euclides del Moral, a Mexico Foreign Ministry deputy director general, said Tuesday there were “certain gray aspects” in the consulate notification in Hernandez-Llanas’ case. “The execution of a Mexican national is of great concern,” he said.

However, the issue never surfaced in Hernandez-Llanas’ appeals, which focused primarily on claims that his mental impairment made him ineligible for the death penalty. Testimony from psychiatrists who said he was not mentally impaired and would remain a danger was faulty, his attorneys argued.

He wouldn’t be facing execution “but for the testimony of two experts, neither of whose testimony can withstand a moment’s scrutiny, and neither of whom should have been permitted to testify at all,” lawyers Sheri Johnson and Naomi Torr said.

According to trial testimony, Hernandez-Llanas was arrested just hours after the attacking Lich and his wife. He was sleeping in the bed where he had wrapped his arm around the terrorized woman, who managed to wriggle from his grasp and restraints without waking him and call police.

Evidence showed Hernandez-Llanas was in Texas after escaping from a Mexican prison, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for a 1989 bludgeoning murder in Nuevo Laredo. He was linked to the rape of a 15-year-old girl and a stabbing in Kerrville. While awaiting trial, evidence showed he slashed another inmate’s face with a razor blade. In prison, he was found with homemade weapons.

“This is exactly why we have the death penalty,” Lucy Wilke, an assistant Kerr County district attorney who helped prosecute Hernandez-Llanas, said ahead of the execution. “Nobody, even prison guards, is safe from him.”

Hernandez-Llanas was the sixth prisoner executed this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest death penalty state.

Appeals court: Texas execution back on – Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas

April 8, 2014

Execution of a Texas death row inmate was back on schedule Monday after a federal appeals court ruled that the state doesn’t have to reveal where it gets its lethal injection drug.

HOUSTON — The execution of a Texas death row inmate was back on schedule Monday after a federal appeals court ruled that the state doesn’t have to reveal where it gets its lethal injection drug.

The ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, 44, is set for execution Wednesday.

Attorneys for Hernandez-Llanas and another inmate, Tommy Lynn Sells, had filed a lawsuit last week saying they needed the name of the drug supplier in order to verify the drug’s potency. They said they feared the prisoners could suffer unconstitutional pain and suffering if the drug weren’t tested.

The state argued it was protecting the company from threats of violence.

A lower court initially sided with the inmates, but the 5th Circuit reversed that ruling last week for Sells, who was executed Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the appeals court decision. The appeals court had said it would rule later on Hernandez-Llanas’ case.

The state attorney general’s office had urged the 5th Circuit to lift the lower court order, arguing that the new supply of pentobarbital came from a licensed compounding pharmacy. The state also noted that the drug had been used “painlessly and successfully” on Sells, and that there was “no pharmacy, no drug and no assurance of quality that Hernandez would find satisfactory.”

Attorneys have decided not to appeal Monday’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court because the high court turned down the same request from Sells last week, according to Maurie Levin, among the lawyers who filed the drug secrecy lawsuit.

Instead, his lawyers have turned to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, arguing that his sentence should be commuted to life in prison or his execution at least delayed because of what they say was faulty testimony from psychologists at his trial. The psychologists told jurors that Hernandez-Llanas was not mentally impaired and would remain a future danger, which his lawyers dispute.

Texas execution to go ahead after court reverses judge’s order within hours – Tommy Sell

april 3, 2014

A federal appeals court on Wednesday threw out a ruling requiring the Texas prison system to disclose more information about where it gets lethal-injection drugs, reversing a judge who had halted an upcoming execution.

Only hours before the appellate decision, a lower-court judge issued a temporary injunction halting the execution of Tommy Lynn Sells, a convicted serial killer who was set to die Thursday.

The case originally included Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, another inmate scheduled to be put to death next week. But the appellate ruling affected only Sells. The appeals court said it would take up Hernandez-Llanas’ case at a later date.

The case now is likely headed to the US supreme court.

District judge Vanessa Gilmore had issued a temporary injunction on Wednesday ordering Texas to provide the lawyers representing Sells and Hernandez-Llanas with information about the supplier and quality of a new batch of pentobarbital, a barbiturate that is to be used in the lethal injections.

Sells was scheduled to die in the Texas state penitentiary on Thursday, and Hernandez-Llanas six days later. Texas’s previous supply of compounded pentobarbital expired on 1 April, and the state has repeatedly refused to reveal the source of its new drugs, claiming that secrecy is needed in order to protect suppliers from threats of violence and intimidation.

Lawyers for the pair argue that Texas’s attorney general had previously ruled on several occasions that such information must be made public, and also said that failing to provide details about the origin, purity and efficiency of the drugs harmed the inmates’ ability to mount a legal challenge over the possibility that they could experience an excessively painful death in violation of their constitutional right not to suffer a “cruel and unusual” punishment.

In her ruling, Gilmore agreed, and instructed Texas not to execute the men until it has disclosed to the lawyers “all information regarding the procurement of the drugs defendants intend to use to carry out plaintiffs’ executions, including information about the supplier or suppliers, any testing that has been conducted, what kind, by whom, and the unredacted results of such testing.”

In recent years an EU-led boycott has made it harder for states to source their execution drugs of choice, resulting in some states turning to experimental drugs and procedures to replace the sequence of three substances that was commonly used before the boycott. In its executions, Texas now employs only pentobarbital, which is often used to euthanize animals. Last year, it bought a supply of the drug from a compounding pharmacy in suburban Houston.

Death penalty opponents argue that, because compounding pharmacies are not subject to federal oversight, there is a risk of impurities and inconsistencies that could make their products unreliable and cause undue, unconstitutional, of suffering.

Texas officials argued that prior executions using pentobarbital have taken place apparently without the inmates enduring obvious pain and cited a report which says that their latest supply has been “tested by an independent laboratory and found to be 108% potent and free from contaminants”.