MICHAEL GRACZYK
Associated Press 5 hours ago
HUNSTVILLE, Texas (AP) — Pablo Lucio Vasquez remembered getting drunk and high on an April evening in 1998 before leaving a party with his 15-year-old cousin and his cousin's 12-year-old friend.
Vasquez later would tell detectives that as they reached a wooden shed, he started hearing voices telling him to kill the younger boy, David Cardenas. 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.
"Something just told me to drink," Vasquez said in a videotaped statement to police in Donna, a small town in Texas' Rio Grande Valley.
"You drink what?" a detective asked. "His blood," Vasquez replied.
Vasquez, now 38, is set for lethal injection Wednesday for what police speculated at the time may have been an attempted satanic cult crime. Evidence of that nature, however, didn't surface at Vasquez's 1999 capital murder trial or in appeals, where courts as recent as last month rejected arguments Vasquez was mentally ill and should be exempt from the death penalty.
His execution would be the 11th this year nationally, and the sixth in Texas.
Vasquez's lawyer, James Keegan, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the punishment so the justices can consider arguments that several potential jurors were excluded improperly at Vasquez's trial because they either were opposed to the death penalty or not comfortable making such a judgment.
A death sentence shouldn't be carried out if it was reached by a jury that rejected members "simply because they voiced general objections to the death penalty or expressed conscientious or religious scruples against its infliction," Keegan told the high court, which did not immediately rule on the appeal.
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