A Paraguayan national convicted of capital murder in Virginia was put to death by lethal injection on Tuesday night, 2 1/2 hours after the scheduled time. The Supreme Court of the United States in a 6-3 vote had earlier rejected a plea for a stay of execution. It was the 50th execution in Virginia since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1976. Virginia has now the second highest state total of executions after Texas.
Six justices of the Supreme Court rejected the claim of the International Court of Justice at The Hague that the prisoner, Angel Francisco Breard (32), had not been advised of a right under international treaty, signed by the United States, requiring Washington to confer with the Paraguayan consul after his arrest. Virginia admits the violation of the Vienna Convention but the Supreme Court majority concluded that "the failure to notify the Paraguayan consul occurred long ago and has no continuing effect".
The Governor of Virginia, Mr James Gilmore, refused to delay the execution because that "would have the practical effect of transferring responsibility from the state courts and the United States to the international court" which had no power to enforce its decisions. However, Paraguay said the decision was binding.
The three justices who voted against the majority argued that the issues were sufficient to justify a stay of execution.
The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, in an unusual intervention asked Mr Gilmore on Monday to stay the execution, because otherwise she feared that Americans abroad may be denied the same right under the Vienna Convention of talking to a US consul if stranded or jailed in a foreign country.
Mr Breard, was convicted of the brutal murder of a woman neighbour when he was drunk. A consul would have advised him to plead guilty, his defenders say, as he admitted the offence. This would have meant a life sentence.
According to Amnesty International there are more than 70 foreign nationals on death row in the US.
Reuters adds from Geneva: Following a critical United Nations report on executions, the US has angrily rejected charges by a UN investigator that it applied the death penalty in an unfair, arbitrary and discriminatory way.
The report by the Senegalese investigator, Mr Bacre Waly Ndiaye, was "severely flawed", the US ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Mr George Moose, said yesterday.
Mr Ndiaye visited the United States last September on behalf of the UN Human Rights Commission, having received State Department permission after being turned down since 1993.