On Thursday evening, the US Supreme Court announced that it maintains the plan to execute the convicted 54-year-old David Renteria, AP journalist Juan Lozano reports on X, formerly Twitter.
The execution was scheduled to take place at 18:00 local time, i.e. around 02:00 Norwegian time.
On the night of Friday, he said his last words, AP reports.
– I apologize for all the mistakes I have made. And for those who have prayed for my death, who are about to murder me, I forgive you, Renteria must have said his last words loud and clear.
Eleven minutes later he was pronounced dead.
Renteria was sentenced to 20 years in prison after he abducted a five-year-old girl from a Walmart shopping center in 2001, strangled her and burned her body, the Texas Department of Justice writes on its website.
Renteria himself has denied that he had anything to do with the murder, and believes local gang members were responsible for the girl’s death, writes the AP news agency.
His lawyers have protested that they have not been given access to the case’s documents, and thus have not been allowed to follow up on these claims to prove the 54-year-old’s innocence. That was the reason why they asked the Supreme Court to postpone the execution.
The prosecution rejects this as pure strategy and points out that the lawyers have had several years to gain access to the documents.
The gang hypothesis is linked to the testimony a woman gave to the police in El Paso, Texas, in 2018 and 2020. There she explained that her ex-husband, a member of the Barrio Azteca criminal gang, was involved in the murder of a girl who had disappeared from Walmart.
2023-11-17 03:33:45
#executed #night
