During 25 years on Texas’ death row, Cesar Fierro’s mental health has deteriorated to the extent that his attorney hardly recognizes him. Since being sentenced to death in 1980, his mother has died, his brother has died, his wife divorced him and his daughter stopped visiting him. Gradually, he refused to even speak with his lawyers.

“He wouldn’t come out of his cell for months at a time unless he was forcibly extracted,” says David Dow, a constitutional law professor at the University of Houston Law Center and director of its Texas Innocence Network. “He refused to shower and there were feces on his cell wall. It was very disturbing … .”

Dow said that when Fierro was sent to death row in 1980, he was a soft-spoken, slightly overweight man in his mid-20s who was highly respectful of his lawyers and the process, which he felt would set him free.

“When I saw him last year, he had long, stringy hair and a strong wind could have blown him over,” says Dow. Even when told of some good news from the courts, Fierro raged and rambled incoherently, banging the phone against the glass partition of the visiting room.

Fierro’s case is one among about 50 similar cases in which the International Court of Justice recently ruled that the convictions and death sentences of Mexican nationals should be given further review in U.S. courts. President Bush has ordered the courts in Texas and elsewhere to comply with the World Court’s ruling, but Texas authorities have said Bush lacks the proper authority. The issue of the effect of the World Court’s ruling is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.

(Texas Lawyer, May 2, 2005). See Foreign Nationals; also DPIC’s description of Medellin v. Dretke (in U.S. Supreme Court); Mental Illness and Time on Death Row.