HOUSTON—A Mexican-born Texas prisoner whose death sentence set off an international dispute that resulted in the U.S.  Supreme Court rebuffing the White House has received an Aug. 5 execution date.

TDCJ

Jose Ernesto Medellin

A state district judge in Houston on Monday set the lethal injection date for 33-year-old Jose Medellin for his participation in the rape-slayings of two teenage girls 15 years ago.

The Supreme Court in March voted against hearing Medellin's case. The panel said President Bush overstepped his authority by trying to order Texas to reopen his case and the cases of 50 others born in Mexico and condemned for murders in the U.S.

Medellin, handcuffed and wearing a bright lime green jail jumpsuit, stood impassively between his lawyers as Cosper read the order. Lawyers for Medellin and the Mexican government urged her to delay setting the execution date.

“This is a case whose effects go far beyond this courtroom,” Medellin’s attorney, Sandra Babcock, said.

During Bush’s six-year tenure as Texas governor, 152 inmates went to the state’s death chamber, the nation’s busiest. But the president took the side of Medellin and 50 other Mexican nationals on death rows around the U.S. after an international court ruled in 2004 their convictions violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country’s consular officials.

The International Court of Justice, also known as the world court, said the Mexican prisoners should have new court hearings to determine whether the violation affected their cases, The White House agreed, but the Supreme Court said Texas could ignore the international court.

“This country is committed to the rule of law,” Donald Donovan, another Medellin attorney, said. “We have a legal obligation. We should comply with it.”

Defense lawyers, warning that Americans abroad could be in legal jeopardy if Medellin was executed, wanted the legal adviser to the Mexican foreign minister to speak. Cosper refused.

“I did not intend to hold a hearing,” she said. “I did intend to set an execution date.”

Roe Wilson, assistant Harris County district attorney, said state and federal courts had reviewed Medellin’s case and that Medellin had been given “the right of every American citizen.”

“The defense is trying to create a climate of sensationalism,” Wilson said.

Medellin is among 14 native Mexicans on death row in Texas.  Mexico has no death penalty and sued the United States in the world court in 2003. Mexico and other opponents of capital punishment have sought to use the world court to fight for foreigners facing execution in the U.S.

Monday’s order makes Medellin at least the sixth inmate in Texas to be scheduled to die in the coming months.

Capital punishment around the nation was on a de facto hold for about seven months until the Supreme Court last month ruled in a Kentucky case that lethal injection was not unconstitutionally cruel.

A convicted Georgia killer whose clemency hearing was under way Monday may be the first to be executed since the Supreme Court ruling.

Medellin was convicted in the June 1993 torture, rape and strangling of Elizabeth Pena, 16, and Jennifer Ertman, 14. The Houston girls, whose bodies were found four days after they failed to return from a friend’s house, had been attacked as they took a shortcut along some railroad tracks and stumbled on a group drinking beer after initiating a new gang member.

Evidence showed the girls were gang raped for more than an hour, then were kicked and beaten before being strangled by a belt or shoelaces.

A tip from the brother of one of the gang members led police to the arrests in the killings that shocked even crime-hardened Houston.

“This guy got to live 15 more years,” Adolph Pena, Elizabeth’s father, said outside the courtroom. “It is a long time coming.”

“I’m looking forward to watching (him) die,” said Randy Ertman, Jennifer’s father.

One gang member, Derrick Sean O’Brien, was executed in July 2006. O’Brien identified Medellin as the person pulling one end of the belt around Ertman’s neck as he yanked on the other. He and Medellin were both 18 at the time.

Peter Cantu, described by authorities as ringleader of the gang, remains on death row without an execution date.

Two other gang members, Efrain Perez and Raul Villarreal, had their death sentences commuted to life in prison when the Supreme Court in 2005 barred executions for those who were 17 at the time of their crimes. Medellin’s brother, Vernancio, was 14 at the time and received a 40-year prison term.