John Balentine, 54, has never denied the facts, but his lawyer Shawn Nolan has argued that he received the death penalty because of racist biases during his trial.
The American state of Texas on Wednesday evening executed a man sentenced to death for a triple murder after a trial tainted, according to his lawyers, by racist prejudices.
John Balentine, a 54-year-old African-American, was given a lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m., prison officials said, nearly 25 years after shooting three white teenage boys in their sleep.
According to court documents, one of them was the brother of his former girlfriend, who disapproved of their interracial relationship and threatened to kill him.
Suspicions of racism
In an appeal which the Supreme Court of the United States did not follow up on, lawyer Shawn Nolan recalled that the prosecutor had dismissed the black jurors and accused the lawyers who had then defended John Balentine of having “shown a racist animosity” toward their client.
“Do you know how to spell ‘justified lynching’?” wrote one of them in a scribbled note, referring to the murders committed in the segregationist South to traumatize the black population.
In addition, Shawn Nolan had argued, one of the jurors, a former soldier hostile to African-Americans, had “intimidated” the others in order to convince them to pronounce the death penalty. John Balentine is the sixth death row inmate executed this year in the United States.
