Last week Texas Governor Rick Perry resisted pressure to spare the life of Humberto Leal Garcia, 38, who had raped and murdered a 16-year-old girl, and instead had the convicted rapist/murderer put to death for his grotesque crimes.
Weathering such protests is nothing out of the ordinary for Perry; a strong proponent of the death penalty, he has overseen the execution of more than two hundred “dead men walking.” But what made this instance noteworthy is that the pleas came not just from the typical capital punishment opponents but from international diplomats, judges, military officials, politicians, even the United Nations. On a website devoted to Leal one can find a list of his supporters almost as long as the screw-studded stick he left inside his teen victim’s vagina. The topper was an eleventh-hour appeal from the Obama administration itself.
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What is it about Leal’s case that prompted protest from such high-powered and far-ranging corners? The argument from the White House and others was that his execution “would place the United States in irreparable breach of its international law obligation.” A “Mexican national” (he had lived illegally in the U.S. since the age of two) Leal had not been informed, after his arrest, of his right to consult the crack legal team at the Mexican consulate – an oversight which the International Court of Justice at The Hague rules is a violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Leal, as such, should have been notified of his right to call up his embassy and have all that rape-murder unpleasantness wiped clean as tidily as “some New Guinean ambassador’s parking tickets,” as crime reporter Tina Trent put it in a blistering blog.
Instead, Humberto Leal and his attorney Sandra Babcock were forced to insist on his innocence, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, through forty-five hearings and appeals over a period longer than the life of his young victim, before he finally confessed at his execution: “I have hurt a lot of people… I take full blame for everything. I am sorry for what I did.” This was just before he shouted – twice – his patriotic final words, “Viva Mexico!” If Senõr Leal had lived there, of course, instead of illegally in the U.S., Adrea Sauceda would still be alive. (If you have the stomach for it, read here to get the full horrifying details of how the teen Sauceda passed her final hours on earth.)
“A technicality doesn’t give anyone a right to come to this country and rape, torture and murder anyone,” said the victim’s mother. Sorry, Mrs. Sauceda, but President Obama and his radical colleagues have a broader agenda in mind than justice for your insignificant daughter. Tina Trent suggests that Obama’s intervention on Leal’s behalf can be traced back to a 2003 conference called Human Rights at Home: International Law in U.S. Courts, which featured the usual suspects: the ACLU, The Jimmy Carter Center, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International. Also presenting at the conference was Leal’s attorney Babcock herself and a raft of radical elements: Bernardine Dohrn, the unrepentant former terrorist/current radical academic, and the not-so-better-half of Bill Ayres (whose c.v. is the same); Van Jones, the continually self-reinventing, race-baiting Communist “truther” (and defender of another convicted killer and cause célèbre, Mumia Abu Jamal); and representatives from the Open Society Institute, funded by the ubiquitous puppet master of the Left, George Soros. Radical transnationalist Harold Koh, now Obama’s State Department legal adviser and one of those who pushed for Leal’s international “rights,” participated as well. The conference’s official description said that one of its purposes was to “ensure U.S. accountability for violating international human rights principles” – hence the campaign for “justice” for illegal alien and rapist-murderer Humberto Leal.
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