Mexican citizen Humberto Leal was arrested in 1994 and charged with kidnapping, raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl named Adria Sauceda in Texas. He bludgeoned her to death and left the body on a dirt road in San Antonio.

No one was ever in any doubt of Leal’s guilt – as far as everyone is concerned, he definitely did it. But that’s not the issue. The problem is that when Texan police arrested the Mexican and incarcerated him, they never gave him the opportunity to call the Mexican consulate, and they didn’t even inform him that he had the right to do so.

This is a huge deal, as it’s very important to fully explain to someone their rights when you arrest them. And the more that people investigated the matter, it was revealed that Leal wasn’t the only Mexican citizen on death row in Texas who had been denied the right to call the Mexican consulate.

After some messy politics involving the International Court of Justice’s conclusion that these denied rights were unacceptable and the Supreme Court’s decision that Congress had to pass the necessary laws, Leal was granted a stay of execution due to fears that carrying out his death sentence might create friction in US-Mexican relations.

Nevertheless, Lean was eventually killed by lethal injection in 2011 and no real blowback was ever experienced.