For my sins, pun intended, I am very rarely in agreement with most Vatican standpoints on certain issues, particularly divorce, women priests and celibacy. But when the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Renato Martino, said last month that the resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly calling for an international moratorium on the application of the death penalty is a “relevant step” in the defence of life, I could not help applauding. Although it only has symbolic value since it is not an agreement that binds countries, the resolution was still a step in the right direction.

According to Cardinal Martino, the resolution, which was supported by 99 countries, with 52 voting against and 33 abstaining, “is very important, and it is gratifying that so many Catholic organisations have worked for this and thus they have the right to be pleased”. There were of course a lot more lay, non-religious and non-Catholic organisations backing it too.

“I am very happy,” Cardinal Martino added, and you can’t blame him. He was the Holy See’s representative to the United Nations for more than 16 years and during that time it is known he collaborated in two efforts during the 1990s to achieve this moratorium. “We worked very hard and we were discouraged when the votes were tallied and the project had to be withdrawn because the numbers were just not there,” he said. This time the numbers were happily there and for this reason I am personally very pleased on two counts: 1. The emerging new trend against capital punishment all over the world, from China to the United States; and 2. The resolution brings hope to thousands of people awaiting execution, one of them my namesake, Charles Flores, a Death Row inmate since April 1999 at the Terrell Unit in Livingston, Texas.

I was incredulous when a friend, either by cruel jest or a keen sense of observation, forwarded me the Internet link to the Charles Flores website which the Hispanic inmate runs from his Texas cell. As an avid anti-capital punishment supporter, it was eerie, to say the least, to find one’s own name associated with such an awful and barbaric system of punishment. Had my mum stuck to her original baptismal branding of “Carmel” perhaps the individual effect would have been much less.

But she didn’t and here I was trying to see what my Texan namesake was going through.

This is his introduction: “My name is Charles Flores. I am a twenty-nine-year old Hispanic male. I am 6ft 1in tall, heavily built with black hair and eyes and I’m from Dallas, Texas. I am also an innocent man who has been maliciously charged, prosecuted, found guilty and sentenced to die for a capital murder I did not commit. The only thing I am guilty of is being a poor, Hispanic male. I have been prosecuted by the Dallas County District Attorney, who was willing to go to any lengths to convict me of this crime, regardless of my innocence. The presiding District Court judge did not care about justice, he was only concerned about appearing to be tuff on crime and so he allowed this travesty of justice to go on in his court.”

I admit that the vast majority of Death Row inmates, wherever this inhuman law is still active, would plead the same cause, screaming out their innocence and claiming miscarriages of justice, but I must believe Charles Flores. It is both an emotional assessment and another effective way of furthering the anti-capital punishment campaign.

Flores insists there is no physical evidence that links him to the crime. No fingerprints, no footprints, no DNA evidence (he gave blood for this purpose), no hair samples, no clothing fibres, nothing at all. There is no eyewitness to the murder and the murder weapon was never found. The rest of this poor man’s story is one whole series of judicial fiddling, Gestapo tactics aimed at making witnesses, some of them facing criminal charges themselves, change testimonial versions and blatant threats against his own family, including his wife, mother and father, who were arrested on separate occasions. On the day the crime was committed, a witness who lived next door to the deceased is known to have told homicide investigators she had seen someone at the residence of the deceased before the crime took place. She gave them the following description: white male, 6ft tall, medium build, long dark hair, and dark eyes. But for the long dark hair and an inch here and there, it could easily have been Charles Flores from Malta, but certainly not Charles Flores from Texas. Only three days after the crime, the witness was shown a six-photo line-up that included an image of Flores but she did not select it. She was then hypnotised “to refresh her memory” and shown the photos once more. Again, she did not pick the Flores photo.

Now if such things can happen in what is purported to be the democratic sanctuary of the United States, one shivers to even think what goes on with regard to similar cases in places like China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Hence, all the more good reason for the UN moratorium resolution. The vote last month was historic because it is, in essence, very strong moral pressure and it points to a standard that has become important for all countries that do not use the death penalty and hopefully have an impact on laws in individual countries.

Incidentally, Charles Flores is an artist and, perhaps even more uncanny from a personal perspective, writes poetry, all of which he shares with anyone interested from his prison cell. If any reader would like to make a donation to his campaign to raise world-wide recognition of his case and to find enough funds to finally obtain a competent appeal counsel, or to just offer moral support, his address is: Charles Flores #999299, Polunsky Unit D.R., 12002 FM 350 South Livingston, Texas 77351, USA.

Please don’t let them kill me.