Texas Executes Latino After Bush Refuses to Grant Stay

AUSTIN, Texas —  Despite protests from civil rights and Latino advocacy groups, Texas Gov. George W. Bush refused on Thursday to grant a stay of execution in a death penalty case laced with charges of racial bias.

Jessy San Miguel, 28, was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m. from lethal injection, after Bush declined to grant his request for 30 more days to explore whether racially tinged remarks biased the jury to sentence him to death for a brutal 1991 rampage that left four dead.

In a brief, final statement reported by Associated Press, San Miguel told friends and relatives that he loved them.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, his arms outstretched on the death chamber gurney. “Ironic, isn’t it, you know? I’m a cross. Y’all take care of each other. I’ll be watching over you.”

San Miguel’s lawyer said her client never got a full, fair hearing.

“Bush can’t claim anymore with a straight face that the Texas death penalty is fair,” said Danalynn Recer, a New Orleans-based attorney. “It’s not a fair legal process. It’s revenge. And it’s mean-spirited and it’s racist.”

But a Bush spokesman said the governor thoroughly reviewed the case.

“The position of the governor’s office is that Mr. [San] Miguel has had full access to the courts, that Gov. Bush believes there is no doubt about his guilt in committing this horrible crime and that, therefore, the governor will not issue a onetime 30-day delay in this case,” said Mike Jones, a Bush spokesman.

Unlike the intense publicity surrounding the execution of Gary Graham last week, San Miguel’s case was never a question of innocence. He admitted to gunning down four people, including a pregnant teenager, in the cooler of a Taco Bell restaurant in Irving during a botched robbery attempt.

Though the case was not prominently featured in mainstream media, several Spanish-language outlets focused on San Miguel’s case as an example of how Latinos nationally are overrepresented on death row.

The resulting coverage generated renewed attention to Bush’s death penalty record among a mostly Latino audience, one of the voter blocs the presumed Republican presidential nominee is trying hard to woo on the campaign trail. With San Miguel’s death, Bush has presided over 136 executions, more than any other governor in U.S. history.

In the San Miguel case, death penalty opponents alleged the jury may have been influenced by what the advocates said were racist statements by the prosecution and the defense.

San Miguel’s defense attorney quizzed several witnesses about the “pushy and macho” attitude of Mexican Americans. And the prosecutor asked jurors to pay attention to those who “cross that border” when committing crimes.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, whose national convention Bush addressed on Monday, protested the execution, as did several death penalty opposition groups.