(22 Jan 2014) Hundreds of protesters marched through the Mexican city of Cuernavaca on Tuesday, calling for the pardon of a Mexican man who faces execution in the US.
Edgar Tamayo is due to be executed by lethal injection in Texas on Wednesday, for the 1994 fatal shooting of a police officer who had arrested him for robbery.
Tamayo's cousin, Delfina Cruz Arias, said that it appeared Texas Governor Rick Perry didn't have a heart, asking him to have mercy on her cousin.
"There is no evidence. He was tested to check if he had shot the gun and they couldn't confirm it. So now what happens, is this racism?" she said at the protest.
Mexico has been asking the US to halt Tamayo's execution because the inmate wasn't told he could get legal help from the Mexican government as agreed under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
Tamayo's lawyers say assistance from the Mexican consulate could have helped him obtain mitigating evidence to persuade jurors to choose a punishment other than death.
During Tuesday's protest in Tamayo's birthplace, 70 kilometres (43.5 miles) south of Mexico City, Mexican Farmers and Migrants leader Taurino Castro Salgado set a US ten dollar bill on fire to protest against the US death penalty.
"The dollar bill has an inscription, it says 'In God We Trust'," he said.
"How can a nation, and a state of the United States, say they believe in God when one of the commandments of the Catholic religion is you shall not murder?" he continued.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, found that Tamayo and more than four dozen Mexican citizens awaiting execution in the United States had not been advised of their consular rights under the Vienna Convention when they were arrested.
The court urged new hearings in courts where those people were convicted, to determine if consular access would have affected their cases.
A year later, President George W. Bush agreed with the international court and urged that the new hearings be held.
The US Supreme Court, however, overruled Bush, and the impact of the international court decision on an appeal brought by Mexican national and Texas death row inmate Jose Medellin.
Medellin was executed in 2008.
A Supreme Court majority determined that only the US Congress could require states to follow the international court's ruling.
Legislation to accomplish that has never been passed.
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