John Balentine’s lawyer, 54, tried all the appeals to avoid capital punishment for his client, guilty of the murder of three adolescents in 1998. In vain.
MO12345LEMONDE with AFP
Texas executed on Wednesday February 8 at the beginning of the evening a man sentenced to the death penalty for a triple murder after a tiny trial, according to his lawyers, by racist prejudices.
John Balentine, a 54-year-old African-American, received a lethal injection and his death was pronounced at 6.36 p.m., the prison administration said, almost 25 years after having shot down three white teenagers in their sleep.
According to court documents, one of them was the brother of his former girlfriend, who represented their interracial relationship and had threatened to kill him. John Balentine never denied the facts, but his lawyer Shawn Nolan argued that he had received capital punishment due to racist bias during his trial.
refused requests
In an appeal to which the Supreme Court of the United States did not give a follow-up, he had recalled that the prosecutor had dismissed the black jurors and accused the lawyers who had then defended John Balentine of having “manifested an animosity racist “towards their client. “Do you know how to spell” justified lynching “?” Wrote one of them in a scribbled note, in reference to the murders committed in the southern segregationist to traumatize the black population.
In addition, had advanced Shawn Nolan, one of the jurors, a former soldier hostile to African-Americans, had “intimidated” the others in order to convince them to pronounce capital pain. “I am rather stubborn and aggressive,” admitted Dory England in writing in 2021. During the deliberations, “I made understand that (…) The death penalty was the only solution,” he recognized in This document attached to the procedure.
Shawn Nolan had transmitted his testimony and other new elements to Texan justice on January 30 to request a reopening of the file. But the latter had refused his request, pushing him to turn to the last minute towards the Supreme Court, without success. John Balentine is the sixth sentence to death executed this year in the United States.