A Black man who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Amarillo, Texas, was executed on Feb. 8.
John Balentine was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m. from a lethal injection administered by the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
The 54-year-old was convicted of killing three teenage boys in Amarillo back in 1998. The then-28-year-old confessed to the murders, having shot the three boys in the head as they slept inside a home Balentine once shared with his ex-girlfriend.
Balentine claimed that one of the three teens — who were all white — had threatened to kill him because Balentine was in an interracial relationship with his sister, but an all-white jury in Texas sentenced him to death.
Balentine admitted to shooting Edward Mark Caylor, 17, 15-year-old Kai Brooke Geyer and 15-year-old Steven Watson after he saw a note from one of the victims that said, “I am gowing [sic] to kill the n—r.” The brother of one of the victims also testified that sometime before the killings, he pinned a note about the Ku Klux Klan to Balentine’s front door.
Balentine was the only Black person in the room during his trial in 1999, and his appeals focused on racial bias during the trial. His lawyers claimed that they have new evidence about the jury foreperson, Dory England, and his racist history.
England reportedly said he did not like Black people and often used the N-word. The foreperson also allegedly said they believed that interracial relationships were wrong. One of Balentine’s own trial lawyers wrote a note to another attorney which said, “Can you spell justifiable lynching?”
England also allegedly bullied the other jurors and said in an affidavit that he would have to “hunt him down” if Balentine ever received parole.
“I knew if the others opted for life there was a chance he could get paroled, I would need to hunt him down,” England wrote. “If I ever saw Balentine on the street, I’d shoot him myself.”
