Evil with a smile. Jose Medellin.

On Aug. 5, 2008, just before 10 p.m., Texas did its part to bring balance to the nation. Jose Ernesto Medellin was strapped to a gurney, permitted a final statement, and then put to death in Huntsville. At last, equilibrium is near for the families of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena. Medellin was the second to be executed from the gang of six who savagely raped and killed the two teenage girls from Houston in June of 1993.
Medellin’s sentence finally being carried out is a step in so many right directions. Most importantly, his death is another victory in the fight for justice in the names of Elizabeth Pena and Jennifer Ertman. No matter what the national significance of a case may be, we must never forget the loss felt by the victims’ families, and that we are also fighting for their peace of mind.
Outside The Walls Unit on the night Medellin was put to death were dozens of people protesting his impending execution. The inability of those men and women to comprehend the reality of that evening was evident in their thoughtless behavior. If those who were there, boisterously protesting the execution while spouting ideas from the World Court, had taken even a moment to think about the families of the two girls who were murdered after being violated, disgraced and used as though they were somehow less than human, they would have put down their signs and their megaphones and gone home—heads hung in shame.
Randy Ertman, Jennifer Ertman’s father, was present for Medellin’s execution just as he was present for Derrick Sean O’Brien’s in July of 1996. This man spent every minute of the last fifteen years in agony. After all of the anger, all of the questions and all of the tears, Randy Ertman’s tragedy was trivialized when protesters had the audacity to cry when news that officials were given the green light to proceed with the execution spread. How dare they shed a tear for that man and have the nerve to call themselves Americans.  Jose Medellin was not a victim of Texas justice. He was not mistreated. He was an illegal alien who not only confessed to, but callously bragged about the rape-slaying of two American teenage girls.
This case is exactly the kind that should spur the government into aggressively enforcing our border regulations, but the media would rather use Medellin to further the globalization of America by painting him as a victim. Jose Ernesto Medellin raped and murdered two of our children and our own government was in a state of total uproar because he didn’t get to ask the Mexican Consulate how to get away with it before we locked him up. If our system of government is in such a state where the “rights” of a convicted rapist and murder, here in our country illegally, supersede those of our own, law-abiding citizens . . . we might as well just stop pretending to care about what is truly right. It’s stale fiction and no one is buying it anymore.
Something I can barely stifle my satisfaction with is the effect Medellin’s successful execution will have on America’s reputation around the world. This should serve as hard evidence that when you come after the people of The United States of America, you will lose. If we could get our act together here at home and start putting our people first, I believe the country could use this as an opportunity to strengthen our national stance through our refusal to bow to the World Court, and our determination to win justice for our people. Once a nation is exposed divided, attacks will surge from all possible angles and soon war will be here, on the very streets where our children play.
There is little room to deny the probability that America may be faced with serious ramifications for carrying out Medellin’s death sentence. But what too many global-minded activists never understand is that American interests at home trump American interests abroad. Yes, this is a hard reality to accept. Nevertheless, it is a reality that must be realized and utilized as a strategic guide in every decision our government makes. Americans need to act in the best interest of America, every time. There is no other way if we wish to ensure the survival of our sovereignty.  Victory cannot simply be maintained; it must be won every day.

Photo: An empty bench outside the American Embassy on Tuesday. There was no candlelit vigil for Medellin in a city still on shock from other violent crime. Deborah Bonello / MexicoReporter.com

On Tuesday, I waited for a man to die. Even though several people die every minute of every day, I’ve never known the name of the person that I knew was going to die; neither have I ever known so closely when they were going to die and how. But yesterday I knew.

The man’s name was Jose Ernesto Medellin, and now he is dead. On Tuesday, he was due to die at 6pm at the hands of the Texan government for the brutal rape and murder of two teenage girls in 1993.

Jose Ernesto Medellin from Mexico Mexican, and the United States Embassy had predicted protests in a case that had attracted international attention and condemnation. The Mexican Government, the International Criminal Court at the Hague as well as other major players such as Ban Ki-Moon of the United Nations had all tried to step in to stop the execution, claiming the United States had violated the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by failing to inform the arrested Mexican nationals of their right to seek help from the Mexican Consulate. Their pleas didn’t work.

So I left the confines of the office to head down to the embassy try to catch some of the expected protests on film around the hour of Medellin’s execution.

At 4:43 pm, there was nobody there. And I mean nobody, save a few tourists taking pictures of Reforma – the traffic artery on which the U.S Embassy sits. Other than them, the only thing outside the Embassy was the ten-foot high blue metal barriers that have been there as long as I can remember, to dissuade the odd Molotov cocktail and other expressions of anti-U.S sentiment that international events can sometimes drum up.

That, and the usual bored-looking policemen, standing around chatting or playing on their mobile phones.

Where is everyone? I thought. He’s only got an hour to live.

I did another swing around the block and watched as a security guard checked the underneath of a truck waiting to enter the Embassy compound. He was using a tool that looked like a giant dentist’s mirror – the kind they use to look into people’s mouths – to look at the undercarriage of the car.

Back around the front. Still no one. I approached a rosy-cheeked policeman at the side of the front entrance to the Embassy.

“Wasn’t there supposed to be a protest today? About Jose Medellin?”

“Today? No,” he said, shaking his head.

“Perhaps tomorrow.”

“But he’s going to die today, at six,” I said.

“Maybe people will come tomorrow,” he answered.

I decided to ring my colleague back in the office.

“This is Reed,” he said when he picked up the phone.

“Unless there’s some other U.S Embassy in Mexico City, there’s no one protesting,” I said.

“Really? No one?”

“No one.”

“They couldn’t be bothered?” he said in a fake British accent he sometimes put on to amuse us.

5:33pm. Just more tourists, passing by, looking at the fence.

6pm came and went. I sat on a bench outside the Embassy, watching the minutes tick by on my phone, wondering what the scene in Texas was like right then. Well, I could kind of imagine it actually. I was sitting pensively when I noticed that the back of my bench had two backrests shaped like giant crucifixes. Weird. And a little creepy.

As it turned out, Medellin didn’t die at 6pm after all – as I discovered when I walked back into the office half an hour later. His case had been put off whilst the U.S Supreme Court considered his appeal. They rejected it, and Medellin was executed a few hours later, declared dead at 9:57pm.

“I’m sorry my actions caused you pain. I hope this brings you the closure that you seek. Never harbor hate,” Medellin, 33, told those gathered to watch him die.

There were no protests in Mexico City yesterday or today about Medellin’s execution. Perhaps Chilangos were too shocked over the discovery of the bullet-ridden body of a 14-year-old boy earlier in the week, who had been kidnapped and held hostage for $6 million from his rich, sports-chain owning father. His father paid the ransom, but they killed him anyway.

Perhaps people so saddened by that they couldn’t care too much about a convicted murderer and rapist confronting his fate north of the border. Who knows. What I DO know is that there was no candlelit vigil here in Mexico City for the man on Tuesday night.

*day edited. ‘Yesterday’ changed to ‘tuesday’. 0926, August 7th

Ungeachtet einer Entscheidung des Internationalen Gerichtshofs hat die Justiz in Texas die Todesstrafe gegen den aus Mexiko stammenden Mörder José Ernesto Medellin vollzogen. Zuvor hatte der Oberste Gerichtshof die Vollstreckung der Todesstrafe angeordnet. Die mexikanische Regierung schickte dem US-Außenministerium eine Protestnote. Quelle

Referenzen:

Today the top story in CNN is about the execution in Texas of Jose Ernesto Medellin. What did he do to earn such a fate?

…he participated in the June 1993 gang rape and murder of two Harris County girls, Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16. He was convicted of the crimes and sentenced to death.

It’s a sad story for several reasons. First of all, for those of us who are opposed to capital punishment, state sanctioned murder is just as wrong as the murders the condemned man himself committed. Secondly, the two young lives of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena, snuffed out before they even had a chance to do something with those lives. And thirdly, in this case, the Bush Administration found a way to ignore international law and treaties concerning foreign detainees.

The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that the United States had violated the rights of the prisoners, in part because officials and prosecutors failed to notify their home country, from which the men could have received legal and other assistance. Those judges ordered the United States to provide “review and reconsideration” of the convictions and sentences of the Mexican prisoners.

Bush said he disagreed with the international court’s conclusions, but agreed to comply with them.

But, the trick he used in order to avoid compliance was to turn it back over to the sovereignty of the States.  This is how the Federal Government operates, when convenient they let the States have the autonomy, in other cases not.

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Así somos y, en realidad, nos vale una pura y dos con sal, puesto que lo cierto es que nadie está seguro de lo que quiere o desea saber u opinar de algo que está más claro que el agua. Mientras familiares y almas piadosas, incluso  a nivel internacional los representantes de gobiernos piden y claman por la vida de un hombre, mexicano por cierto, y que esta en el “paredon” a la silla eléctrica en el Estado de Texas, en Estados Unidos ascusado de la muerte y violación de dos personas, aquí, en el Disrito Federal, capital de la República Mexicana, la ciudadanía se encuentra consternada por la muerte y ejecución por asfixia de un menor de tan solo 14 años de edad, cuyos padres de reconocida  firma, pagaron en su momento 5 millones de pesos y, aún así, sus captores, hasta el tiro de gracia le dieron…Lo más grave en este penoso asunto, y de los que suceden todos los dias, pero que desgraciadamente no se dan a conocer a las luz pública por la ineptitud de las propias autoridades, es que al interior  y  entre los persuntos responsables, están metidos oficiales federales a los que sus “jefes” tienen que tapar para no dar a conocer la corrupción que existe entre las  distintas corporaciones policiacas, donde el “entre”, va desde los oficiales de la esquina hasta los de mero arriba…. La Ejecución de José Ernesto Medellín, en Texas, cuyas autoridades solo esperan un fallo, nos duele hasta el alma, pero la muerte de Fernando Martí, no puede pasar desapercibida, por lo que sus presuntos responsables, no merecen otra pena que la muerte, sí la muerte, aunque las máximas autoridades no  quieran aventar el tiro, pues no es la primer ocasión que esto sucede entre los secuestradores y  creemos que, tasmpoco será la última, toda vez que el negocio del secuestro, además del narcotrafico y el contrabando, es lo que más dinero deja….Ya basta y, desde estas lineas, exigimos el peor de los castigos a ese tipo de delincuentes por Así Somos y….