HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A South Texas man was set to be executed Wednesday after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block his punishment for the 1998 slaying of a 12-year-old boy whose blood the convicted killer said he drank.
Pablo Lucio Vasquez, 38, told police he was drunk and high when voices convinced him 18 years ago to kill David Cardenas by beating the seventh-grader with a pipe and then cutting his throat. He also told detectives in a videotaped statement that he drank some of the boy’s blood.
The Supreme Court, without comment, refused to a request to halt the execution about four hours before Vasquez could be taken to the Texas death chamber. The lethal injection would be the 11th this year nationally, the sixth in Texas.
Vasquez’s lawyer, James Keegan, wanted the justices to review whether several potential jurors were improperly excused from Vasquez’s capital murder trial because they either were opposed to the death penalty or not comfortable making such a judgment.
ht/ Deer Park Dave
Eighteen years and now they want to know about jurors. All I want t know is, did he order a Bloody Mary for his last beverage. I hope the gurney wheels were real screechy and wobbly, like an old Walmart shopping cart, as they took him to the chamber.
“either were opposed to the death penalty or not comfortable making such a judgment”
Seems like a good reason to excuse a potential juror in a capital trial.
May he suffer long and painfully before his demise. The miserable sack of shit.
Take away the death penalty.
Twenty years of breathing while his victim remains dead.
Either make all appeals go through the court in one year after the guilty verdict, then take his ass outside and put a round through his forehead, or stuff him in a cell and feed him till he dies of old age.
This charade is an affront to justice.
Kill them all, let Jack Scratch sort them out.