The US state of Texas executed a man sentenced to death for a triple murder on Wednesday night after a trial flawed, according to his lawyers, by racist bias.
John Balentine, a 54-year-old African-American, received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m., prison officials said, nearly 25 years after shooting three white teenagers in their sleep.
According to court documents, one of them was the brother of his ex-girlfriend, who disapproved of their interracial relationship and threatened to kill him.
suspicions of racism
In an appeal that the Supreme Court of the United States did not follow up on, the lawyer Shawn Nolan recalled that the prosecutor had dismissed the black jurors and accused the lawyers who had then defended John Balentine of having “shown a racist animosity” towards your customer. .
“Do you know how to spell ‘justified lynching’?” one of them wrote on a scribbled note, referring to murders committed in the segregationist South to traumatize the black population.
Furthermore, Shawn Nolan had argued, one of the jurors, an ex-soldier hostile to African-Americans, had “intimidated” the others into pronouncing the death sentence. John Balentine is the sixth death row inmate to be executed in the United States this year.
Source: BFM TV
