Texas was preparing to execute a 33-year-old Mexican man on Tuesday, defying a ruling by an international court, orders from US President George W Bush and demands from the Organization of American States, the US secretary of state and the US attorney general, the dpa reported.
The case, which has become a cause celebre among death penalty opponents, involves Jose Ernesto Medellin Rojas, one of six gang members convicted for the 1993 hour-long rape and brutal murder of two Houston girls, age 14 and 16, as part of a gang initiation ceremony.
Since 1997, Medellin's lawyers and Mexico have been challenging Medellin's death penalty conviction because he is a Mexican citizen and Mexican officials had not been informed of his need for legal help during the trial.
Under the Vienna Convention of Consular Relations, arrested suspects from foreign countries are supposed to have access to their own consulates to seek legal assistance.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) agreed with Mexico and ordered Medellin's case and those of another 50 Mexicans on death row in the US to be reviewed. It followed up last month with an explicit order on the case of Medellin and four other Mexicans on death row in Texas.
Bush, the one-time governor of Texas, tried to carry out the 2004 ICJ decision by taking the unusual step in 2005 of ordering the state of Texas to reopen Medellin's case.
Texas appealed the order to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in March 2008 that the ICJ ruling was binding on the US but that the president had no authority to intervene in state judicial affairs, under a long-standing division of power in the federalist system.