Texas Executes Convicted Killer Despite Plea from Obama
Leal, who was born in Mexico and brought to the United States when he was two years old was convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl in San Antonio and then strangling and bludgeoning her to death in 1994.
From The Americano
Despite an appeal by President Barack Obama and international leaders, convicted murderer Huberto Leal García Jr. was executed Thursday in Texas by legal injection.
The execution was carried out after the U.S. Supreme Court refused a plea for a six month delay by the Obama Administration.
Leal, who was born in Mexico and brought to the United States when he was two years old was convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl in San Antonio and then strangling and bludgeoning her to death in 1994.
Adria Sauceda brutalized nude body was found hours after he left a San Antonio street party with her. She was bludgeoned with a piece of 30- to 40-pound chunk of asphalt.
The appeal by the Obama Administration came after Leal 38, found out that according to an international treaty he had the right to contact the Mexican consulate upon his arrest, and he was never advised of those rights.
According to Associated Press Mexico, the Obama administration and others had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay Leal’s execution so Congress could consider a law that would require court reviews in cases where condemned foreign nationals did not receive help from their consulates.
The court rejected the request 5-4. Its five more conservative justices doubted that executing Leal would cause grave international consequences, and doubted “that it is ever appropriate to stay a lower court judgment in light of un-enacted legislation.”
“Our task is to rule on what the law is, not what it might eventually be,” the majority said. The court’s four liberal-leaning justices said they would have granted the stay.
Administration officials appealed on behalf of Leal, saying that his execution might bring about retaliation from foreign governments to Americans arrested overseas that request assistance from their consular officials.
AP added that Leal’s appeals, however, focused on legislation introduced last month in the U.S. Senate by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. Leahy’s measure would bring the U.S. into compliance with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations provision regarding the arrests of foreign nationals, and ensure court reviews for condemned foreigners to determine if a lack of consular help made a significant difference in the outcome of their cases.
Even though international organizations believe the treaty is binding on all nations, the treaty has never been ratified by the United States Senate and thus not applicable in this country.
In 2005, President George W. Bush agreed with an International Court of Justice ruling that Leal and 50 other Mexican-born inmates nationwide should be entitled to new hearings in U.S. courts to determine if their consular rights were violated. The Supreme Court later overruled Bush.
In his last minutes Leal repeatedly said he was sorry and accepted responsibility.
“I have hurt a lot of people. … I take full blame for everything. I am sorry for what I did,” he said in the death chamber.”
The Americano/Agencies
Obama Pal and Terrorist Dohrn Linked to Mexican Killer Case
By Cliff Kincaid
Crime reporter and blogger Tina Trent says that President Obama’s intervention on behalf of an illegal alien killer can be traced back to a 2003 conference that featured Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and representatives of the Soros-funded Open Society Institute. “The purpose of the conference was to find ways to insinuate international (read: United Nations) laws and resolutions in American legal arenas, as Sandra Babcock is attempting to do to free her client, Humberto Leal,” Trent reports on her blog.
Babcock is the attorney for a killer described in liberal media reports as “a Mexican national” who is in fact an illegal alien convicted of the 1994 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 16-year-old Adria Sauceda in San Antonio, Texas. Leal was scheduled to be executed on Thursday night in Texas before the Obama Administration intervened on his behalf, claiming his rights as an illegal in the U.S., under an international treaty, had not been protected. Leal has had the benefit of 45 different hearings and appeals and his guilt is beyond question.
The issue that Obama is concerned about is whether this illegal alien was able to contact the Mexican embassy in order to protect his “rights” under international law.
Trent reports, “Humberto Leal’s defense attorney, Sandra L. Babcock, of the terrorist-sheltering law school at Northwestern University, has an interesting vitae. Ms. Babcock’s research interest is imposing international law on the American justice system, a hobby she practices with her colleague, terrorist-cum-law-professor Bernardine Dohrn.”
“If President Obama, his friend Bernardine Dohrn, and Jimmy Carter get their way, the police are going to find their hands tied in ten different ways, and our criminal justice system will soon be utterly subservient to whatever the hell they dream up at the U.N.,” Trent says of the Obama Administration’s intervention in the case.
In intervening on behalf of Leal, Obama is acting on behalf of the government of Mexico.
Indeed, Babcock’s work has been funded by the government of Mexico. According to Babcock’s biography, “From 2000-2006 she served as director of the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, a program funded by the Mexican Foreign Ministry to assist Mexican nationals facing capital punishment in the United States. For her work, she was awarded the Aguila Azteca, the highest honor bestowed by the government of Mexico upon citizens of foreign countries, in 2003.”
Dohrn is the former leader of the communist terrorist Weather Underground who, with her husband and fellow terrorist Bill Ayers, hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama when he ran for the state Senate in Illinois. She praised the followers of mass murderer Charles Manson and Manson himself as a “true revolutionary.” Dohrn and Ayers signed a document, “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,” dedicated in part to Sirhan Sirhan, the Marxist Palestinian who killed Robert F. Kennedy. This endorsement played a role in the University of Illinois denying Ayers, who had been a professor of education at the school, emeritus status after he retired.
For her part, Dohrn was jailed for seven months for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the murder of two policemen and a security guard in the 1981 Brinks robbery. She is accused by former FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, based on a meeting he had with Ayers, of planting the bomb that killed San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell in 1970. Dohrn denies the charge.
Van Jones, listed as being “invited” to the international law conference, is the former Obama official and self-proclaimed communist who voiced doubts that Muslims carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Trent notes that Babcock and Dohrn were listed by Northwestern as experts on human rights issues when the Chicago City Council adopted a resolution in support of ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This treaty gives a U.N. body the power to pass judgment over how parents raise their children.
Trent says that in 2003, along with the A.C.L.U., The Jimmy Carter Center, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Soros-funded Open Society Institute, sponsored a conference called Human Rights at Home: International Law in U.S. Courts. The official description said one purpose was that of “Ensuring U.S. accountability for violating international human rights principles…”
Dohrn was on the program, discussing “women and children’s issues.” Another participant was Harold Koh, now Obama’s State Department legal adviser and one of those pushing for Leal’s international “rights.”
In 2004, Dohrn spoke to the Baltimore branch of the Soros-funded Open Society Institute on the subject of discipline in schools. In 1999, according to Dohrn’s curriculum vitae, she spoke at New York University under the auspices of the Open Society Institute on the subject of “Families in a Free Society.” Another Weather Underground terrorist, Linda Evans, who was pardoned and released from prison by President Clinton, received a “Soros Justice Fellowship” to promote the rights of criminals.
Trent explains the Leal case: “As per her academic research and this movement, Babcock is now claiming that the police failed to inform Leal of his right to Mexican consular support when he was arrested. Allegedly, this failure violated the rules of the International Court of Justice at the Hague: Leal, as a ‘Mexican national,’ should have simply been able to call ‘his’ embassy and the entire mess—the body, the rock, the stick, the bloody clothes, et. al. could be whisked away like some New Guinean ambassador’s parking tickets.”
She adds, “But there’s one little problem: Humberto Leal has lived in the United States, apparently illegally, since he was two. Talk about wanting it both ways: Leal was an American until the moment he murdered Adria Sauceda. That changed in the brief space between bashing in a young girl’s head and wiping down the doors of his car. Now he’s a ‘Mexican national,’ a term everyone from the President to the New York Times to “human rights” organizations (Leal’s rights, not Sauceda’s) is using with no irony and no explanation, as they lobby to cloak a killer in layers of special privileges while simultaneously lobbying to prevent police from inquiring about immigration status.”
Trent explains the predicament into which the Obama policy is putting the police. “The police will have to determine if someone is a foreign citizen in order to offer them consular rights, but they’ll also be forbidden to ask if someone is a foreign citizen in the interest of not discriminating against illegal immigrants, a lovely Catch 22 dreamed up by academics. This cliff we’re careening towards is permanent demotion of Americans’ legal rights on their own soil.”
Trent also criticizes coverage of the case by the liberal media, noting that The New York Times “gawkingly refers to Humberto Leal merely as a ‘Mexican citizen,’ as if he wandered over the border one day and ended up smashing a girl’s head in with a rock, his decades of residency in the U.S. tacitly denied.”
A website devoted to Leal and his case lists a number of articles and editorials in support of his “rights,” several of them from The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.
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