Rodrigo Hernandez is scheduled for execution in Texas today. His execution will be the 239th execution under Texas Governor Rick Perry, who has overseen more executions than any governor in U.S. history and more executions than all but a few people in the history of the world. Today’s execution will be the 478th since Texas resumed executions in 1982, so Rick Perry will have overseen exactly one half of all Texas executions in the modern era.
To express your opposition to today’s execution, you can contact Governor Rick Perry’s office at 512 463 2000. If you call after business hours, you can leave a voice mail message. During business hours, someone should answer the phone. You can also send a message using a form on Perry’s official website.
Rodrigo Hernandez January 26, 2012
TDCJ Info on Rodrigo Hernandez
If Hernandez’s execution is carried out, he would be the second person executed in the United States this year following Gary Welch in Oklahoma in January, according to the National Death Penalty Information Center.
Hernandez would be the first person executed this year in Texas, which executed 13 people in 2011 and has put to death more than four times as many people as any other state since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the center.
Hernandez, 38, told the San Antonio Express-News in an interview published this month he didn’t kill Verstegen and will “take that to the grave.”
But Verstegen’s mother, Anna Verstegen of San Antonio, said this week she hopes Hernandez will, before he dies, feel sorry for what he did to her daughter, who left behind a 15-year-old son.
“It’s never too late,” she told Reuters. “We’re just praying for him. The kind of God I believe in can forgive.”
In 2010, Michigan investigators said DNA evidence linked Hernandez to the 1991 murder of Muriel Stoepker, 77, of Grand Rapids, but that he would not be tried since he was on death row in Texas.
Nationwide, the number of executions fell for the second year in a row in 2011, with 43 inmates put to death compared with 46 in 2010 and 52 in 2009, Death Penalty Information Center figures show. In 1999, a record 98 prisoners were executed.
