Texas executes Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas

Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas

A man who escaped prison while serving a murder sentence in Mexico was executed Wednesday by the US state of Texas for a separate 1997 killing.

Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, 44, was in the US illegally when he killed a university professor who had hired him to work on a home renovation project.

Texas' parole and pardons board refused to delay his case.

Hernandez-Llanas becomes the sixth Texas prisoner executed this year. He was pronounced dead at 6:28 p.m.

He is also the second person this week executed in the state by lethal injection with a new supply of pentobarbital.

Hernandez-Llanas spent four hours Wednesday with close relatives, including his mother and some of his brothers.

This week a US appeals court rejected a bid by lawyers for Hernandez-Llanas and another death row inmate, Tommy Lynn Sells, to learn who is supplying Texas with the drug.

They argued they needed to know the source in order to ensure the executions would not be botched by the use of expired or ineffective drugs.

But Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials have refused to identify the source of the sedative, saying secrecy is needed to protect the provider from threats of violence.

Mental impairment claim

In 1997, Glen Lich, 49, hired Hernandez-Llanas to work for him.

Unbeknownst to Lich, Hernandez-Llanas had recently escaped from a Mexican prison where he was serving a 25-year sentence for a 1989 murder.

Several days later, Hernandez-Llanas lured Lich away from his house by telling him falsely there was a problem with a generator. He beat the man to death with a length of steel rebar, then entered the house and attacked Lich's wife.

Sentenced in 2000 for Lich's murder, he was among more than four dozen Mexican nationals awaiting execution in the US in 2004 when the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled they had not been properly informed of their consular rights when arrested.

Another one of those Mexican nationals, Edgar Tamayo, 46, was executed by Texas in January despite objections of both the Mexican and US governments.

Euclides del Moral, a Mexico foreign ministry official, said on Tuesday "the execution of a Mexican national is of great concern".

But the issue did not play a large part in Hernandez-Llanas' appeals, which focused primarily on claims that his mental impairment made him ineligible for the death penalty.

Hernandez-Llanas becomes the 6th inmate to be put to death this year in Texas, the 514th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1982; and the 275th inmate to be put to death in Texas since Rick Perry became governor in 2001.

Hernandez-Llanas becomes the 16th inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1375th overall since the nation resumed executons on January 17, 1977.

Source: BBC News, Agencies, Rick Halperin, April 9, 2014

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