A US inmate at the centre of a legal battle over the religious rights of death row prisoners was executed in Texas yesterday for murder.

John Ramirez, 38, was put to death by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed to AFP.

He was pronounced dead at 6.41pm.

When Ramirez was 20, he stabbed a clerk to death while robbing a convenience store in southern Texas. He avoided capture for four years but was finally arrested in 2008 and sentenced to death a year later.

His execution had initially been scheduled for September last year, but the US Supreme court issued a last-minute stay of execution.

Ramirez’s lawyer petitioned the High Court to halt the execution because the Texas Department of Criminal Justice would not allow Ramirez’s Baptist pastor to have physical contact with him as he was executed or to pray out loud in the death chamber.

Texas prison authorities allow a spiritual adviser to be in the room during an execution, but they must be quiet and are not allowed to touch a prisoner, for security reasons.

In March, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Ramirez’s favor.

The Supreme Court rarely intervenes to halt executions, but it has done so in recent cases where prisoners have argued they are being denied access to spiritual advisers.

In 2018, it rejected the request of a stay of execution for a Muslim prisoner who asked for an imam to be by his side as he was put to death.

A few weeks later, following a public outcry, a stay was granted to an inmate who wanted a Buddhist spiritual adviser to accompany him to the execution chamber.

Several states have banned all spiritual advisers from the death chamber, but the court ruled last year that states could not bar them entirely. – AFP, October 6, 2022.