The US state of Texas executed a man sentenced to death for triple murder on Wednesday night after a trial that his lawyers said was marked by racial prejudice.
John Balentine, a 54-year-old African American man, received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m., prison officials said, nearly 25 years after he shot three white teenagers in their sleep.
According to court documents, one of them was his former girlfriend’s brother, who disapproved of their interracial relationship and threatened to kill him.
John Balentine has never disputed the facts, but his attorney Shawn Nolan has argued that he received the death penalty at his trial for racial prejudice.
In an appeal that the US Supreme Court did not pursue, he recalled that the prosecutor had dismissed the black jury and accused the attorneys who had then defended John Balentine of showing “racial hostility” towards their client.
“Do you know how to spell +justified lynching+? ‘ one of them wrote in a scrawled note, alluding to the killings committed in the segregationist South to traumatize black populations.
In addition, Shawn Nolan had argued, one of the jurors, a former anti-African American soldier, “intimidated” the others to persuade them to hand down the death penalty.
“I’m quite stubborn and aggressive,” Dory admitted to England in writing in 2021.
Shawn Nolan submitted his testimony and other new items to the Texas Judiciary on Jan. 30 for a request for a reopening of the case. But the latter had rejected his application and urged him to appeal to the Supreme Court at the last minute, without success.
John Balentine is the sixth death row inmate to be executed in the United States this year.