Pope Francis, Texas bishops, oppose execution of man whose trial was tainted by racial bias.
Pope Francis opposes the death penalty in all cases, and has faced some criticism from right-wingers for that, but he has taken a special interest in this case.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/09/05/why-pope-francis-texas-bishops-are-trying-save-man-death-row/
The Texas bishops’ intervention comes a year after Pope Francis revised Catholic teaching to hold that capital punishment is always inadmissible and an affront to the “dignity of the person.” (Previously) The church had said the death penalty could be acceptable in rare cases.
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The Texas bishops wrote in their petition that they were pleading Saldaño’s case not only because it involved the church’s position on the sanctity of human life, but also because the church holds that racial bias like that employed against Saldaño is evil.
Saldaño was convicted in 1996 of capital murder for kidnapping a man at a supermarket in Plano, Tex., driving him to a local lake and fatally shooting him. At Saldaño’s trial, a state psychologist, Walter Quijano, testified that Saldaño’s Hispanic heritage put him at a higher risk for perpetrating future violence.
Saldaño’s case rose to the Supreme Court in 2000 and elicited an admission from Texas’s attorney general that the race-based testimony had made Saldaño’s sentencing hearing unconstitutionally flawed, the bishops’ petition says. The court sent the case back to Texas, the petition says, but Saldaño had become mentally unstable by the time he got a new trial in 2004.