HUNTSVILLE — Heliberto Chi, the native Honduran who shot a Dallas-area store manager in the back during an after-hours robbery in 2001, was executed Thursday evening after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch appeal to spare his life.
Chi, 29, was prounounced dead at 6:25 p.m. while the two sons of his victim witnessed the lethal injection in a tiny room adjacent to the death chamber in Huntsville’s Walls Prison Unit.
The high court rebuffed the argument by Chi's lawyers that their client's conviction for killing 56-year-old Armand Paliotta on March 24, 2001, was tainted because he was not made aware of an international treaty that would have allowed him to seek help from representatives from his home country after his arrest.
The execution was the sixth in Texas this year and the second in three days involving a foreign national. On Tuesday, Jose Ernesto Medellin went to his death after the Supreme Court rejected his argument that the 1963 Vienna Convention required that he be notified of his right to seek counsel from his home country.
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