The Texas Department of Justice used to have a remarkable website where you could browse the case files, last words and even the last meals of every inmate executed by the state. I used to spend hours just browsing on it. I distinctly remember there was one case that really stood out to me, even out of the many hundreds there.
The executed man was born in Germany, and he was only in his twenties. And if I recall correctly, he was an actual German by nationality, not simply the child of Americans on a military base or something.
For the life of me, I can’t remember what his name was, or what he did to get executed.
Note - this is NOT the German guy who was executed in Arizona in 1999. This is someone different. I think he may have been an international student who was studying in Texas and got mixed up in a murder.
Texas hasn’t executed any German nationals recently. The LaGrand brothers in Arizona are the only ones on that list (although I don’t know if the guy you’re looking for would be on that list if he was also a US citizen).
I think this might be the guy. And incidentally, on that same page, here is another young man from France. Why aren’t these guys on that list of foreign nationals executed?
The forms state their native countries as Germany and France, respectively, but that does not neccessarily mean they were German or French citizens, respectively (the names Spencer Corey Goodman and Stanley Allison Baker, Jr. seem to indicate that their parents were probably American.) In which case, Goodman would not have been an German citizen by birth, and Baker would only have been a French citizen by birth if one parent had been born in France.
Germany actually took the US to the International Court of Justice over this and if I remember corrrectly, the US got a great bollocking from the judges.
