Only one thing would have been more gratifying than watching a filthy scumbag like José Ernesto Medellín wince as he felt the chilling gush of sodium thiopental run into his arm.  That would have been watching him wiggle like a Mexican jumping bean as 2,000 volts of lightning fried him like an Old El Paso taco shell.

But alas, the hot squat is all but abolished.  Instead we execute prisoners like dogs being put to sleep.  The end result is the same, although in Medellín’s case, only after 5,475 days of three hots and a cot.  That’s 15 years.

Medellín, you might recall, was the illegal-alien Mexican gangbanger who merrily helped rape and murder Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in Houston, Texas, on June 24, 1993.  As I wrote in this space in March, “For an entire hour, [Medellín and the gang] raped and sodomized the girls; ‘The confessions of the gang members,’ one account goes, ‘indicated that there was never less than 2 men on each of the girls at any one time.’  After the rape, the gang strangled Jenny with Sean O’Brien’s red nylon belt.  He pulled on one end while Medellín, O’Brien testified, pulled on the other until it snapped.  They finished the job with Jenny’s shoelaces.  ‘The bitch wouldn’t die,’ Medellín complained afterward.  The gang also strangled Elizabeth with her shoelaces, and the coroner testified that they knocked out two of Elizabeth’s front teeth.  Then the gang members stomped their necks and kicked in Jenny’s ribs.  In another macabre twist, O’Brien showed up on videotape smiling amid a crowd watching investigators at the scene.  Authorities found the girls’ bodies, rotting in the Texas heat, four days later.”

Medellín bragged about the crime, and four years after his unspeakable deeds, he discovered that the authorities in Texas had deprived him of his “right” to consult with Mexican diplomats.  This, of course, led to appeals, and his case landed in front of the International Court of Justice, which ordered the Bush administration to require the states to review 51 such capital cases.  Texas refused.  The U.S. Supreme Court sided with Texas and told the Bush administration it had no jurisdiction to meddle in the execution.  Of course, the World Court had no jurisdiction either, but that didn’t seem to bother the former governor of Texas, George W. Bush.  Either way, Medellín got justice on August 5.

Naturally, globalists everywhere worked themselves into a pother, arguing that ignoring this diktat from a globo-court run by a Chinese judge might bode ill for Americans overseas—as if France would suddenly grab an American off the street, deny consular counsel, then execute him, all because Texas gave a criminal vagabond a dose of reality.  Fat chance.  Then again, if an American illegal immigrant in France did what Medellín did, he would deserve anything the Frogs dished out.

The anti-American left unbosomed themselves of the usual racial propaganda.  Said David Fahti of Human Rights Watch, “that Mr. Medellin is Mexican rather than Swedish, does make a difference.”  Well, he’s right about that.  Eleven million Swedes haven’t crashed the borders of the United States, and if they had they wouldn’t have staged a crime wave tantamount to a declaration of war against American citizens.

But back to Señor Medellín.  How evil was he?  After the Dallas Morning News published an editorial arguing that Medellín should not be executed, anti-death-penalty activist Michael Denson, founder of the Catholic Death Row Ministry in Frisco, wrote a letter to the editor: “I was so sad after I read the editorial.  If these were your two daughters, would you feel the same way?

“I have met José Medellín.  I wrote him.  I have run a death row ministry in Texas for years.

“He has never shown any remorse.  He has proudly confessed.  I used to be opposed to the death penalty until I met José.

“Where is your respect and sympathy for the victims and their families?  You have not even mentioned the two girls this sick creep murdered, or their families.

“José Medellín found it convenient to be a Mexican citizen when he found out it could save him.

“What a disgrace to all the good, honest, law-abiding Mexicans.

“Execute him already.  The girls, along with their families, deserve justice.”

Indeed.  And so did Medellín, at the tip of a hypodermic.