The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area death penalty, and the federal death penalty statute additionally requires a sentencing jury to certify that the defendant’s race was not considered in passing sentence. Fair trial guarantees No developments were monitored during the reporting period related to changes in fair-trial guarantees. Foreign Nationals The case of Humberto Garcia Leal attracted attention at the national and international level, as it was the subject of a hearing before the International Court of Justice. The Court found that, as Texas authorities had failed to notify Leal of his right to contact a Mexican consulate at the time of his arrest, as required by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the United States government had breached its obligations under article 36 of the Convention. The Court ordered the United States not to execute Leal, a Mexican national, pending review and reconsideration of the case. In June 2011, in response to a United States Supreme Court decision, a bill was introduced in the United States Congress aimed at implementing the decision of the International Court of Justice. In July 2010, having learned that the Texas District Attorney planned to ask a Texas trial court to set an October 2010 execution date for Leal, the Legal Advisor to the United States Department of State wrote to the Texas court asking it to refrain from setting an execution date, so as to allow a reasonable opportunity for the legislative process to work. With interventions by the executive branch, Leal’s execution date was delayed until 7 July 2011. Thereafter, the United States government filed a brief as amicus curiae with the United States Supreme Court, supporting Leal’s request for a stay of execution to allow time for Congress to enact the Consular Notification Compliance Act, which would provide Leal’s case the review and reconsideration called for under the International Court of Justice’s Avena decision. That request for a stay was denied by the Supreme Court on 7 July, and Leal was executed later that day, despite requests from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, among other bodies and individuals.59 In another case, the European Parliament called, on 9 June 2011, for United States authorities not to seek the death penalty for Saudi national and Guantanamo detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in a trial before a military court, and to provide for a fair trial 59  Response to the ODIHR questionnaire on the death penalty from the Unites States Department of State, received on 11 September 2011., op. cit., note 43. 14