Pablo Lucio Vasquez, 38, is due to be executed by lethal injection after 6pm on Wednesday evening (CDT) for the murder of 12-year-old David Cardenas in 1998.
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Vasquez, who admitted to being drunk and high at the time, confessed to police that he heard voices in his head that eventually convinced him to kill Cardenas upon reaching a wooden shed near where his body was found.
After his final appeals were denied by the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday afternoon, Vasquez was strapped to a gurney in the Huntsville Unit shortly after 6 p.m. He was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital and pronounced dead at 6:35 p.m.
But Vasquez’s lawyer James Keegan says several potential jurors in the murder trial may have been improperly excused because they were either against the death penalty or not comfortable imposing such a judgement.
State lawyers opposed any delay, arguing the potential jurors’ exclusion was legally proper and that the latest appeal was similar to an unsuccessful one 12 years ago and amounted to “nothing more than a meritless attempt to postpone his execution”, Assistant Texas Attorney General Jeremy Greenwell told the high court in a filing Tuesday. The arms were missing from the corpse, which had no skin on the back and a hole in the back of the head, court papers filed by Texas said.
Vasquez and Cardenas tried to decapitate the boy, and mutilated his body before burying him in a shallow grave and stealing his jewelry, the Associated Press reported.
The execution is Texas’ sixth of the year.
This undated handout photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Pablo Lucio Vasquez. Vasquez turned to look through a window where four of his victim’s relatives watched and told them he was sorry.
“I don’t know”, Orendain said. So he hit the seventh-grader in the head from behind with a pipe, cut his throat and lifted the still-conscious victim so blood would drip on the 20-year-old Vasquez’s face.
“The blood was dripping and (I) got it all over my face”. ‘His blood, ‘ Vasquez replied. When a detective asked what he was drinking, Vasquez clarified that it was the victim’s blood. “I mean, something just told me drink”, he said at the time. “He also stated that he and an accomplice dragged Cardenas’s body to a field for burial”.
‘The devil was telling me to take (the head) away from him, ‘ Vasquez said, adding that ‘it couldn’t come off’.
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He pleaded guilty to murder charges and was sentenced to 35 years in prison in February 1999.
