John Balentine, 54, will receive a lethal injection, nearly 25 years after he was found guilty of shooting three white teenagers as they slept in the city of Amarillo.
One of them was, according to court documents, the brother of his ex-girlfriend, who disapproved of their interracial relationship and had threatened to kill him.
John Balentine has never denied the facts, but his lawyer Shawn Nolan maintains that he received the death penalty for racist bias during his trial.
In an appeal to the US Supreme Court, he recalled that the prosecutor had dismissed black jurors and accused John Balentine’s public defenders at the time of having “displayed racial animus.”
“Do you know how to spell ‘justified lynching’?” Was the sentence that was written on a piece of paper exchanged between Balentine’s then-lawyers, which refers to the murders committed in the segregationist South of the United States against the black population.
Nolan, Balentine’s new defender, also assured that the president of the jury himself was a racist person, who considered black people dangerous.
It was a former soldier hostile to African-Americans, who had “intimidated” the other jurors to convince them to decide for the death penalty.
“I knew that if the others chose life he had a chance of being released and that I would have to hunt him down,” Dory England admitted in writing in 2021.
During the deliberations, “I made it clear that we had been chosen to face this problem and that the death penalty was the only solution,” he acknowledged.
Nolan accused him of withholding details of his life that would have prevented him from being a juror in the trial.
Lawyer Nolan delivered all these documents to the Texas court on January 30, to request that the file be reopened.
But his request was denied, and he had to take his request to the Supreme Court of the United States.
If she does not intervene, John Balentine will be the sixth person on death row to be executed in the United States this year.
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