Willingham was entering his final stage of appeals.
The decision by Judge Nicolás Zambrano in Lago Agrio, a town founded as an oil camp in the 1960s, immediately opened a contentious new stage of appeals in a legal battle that has dragged on in courts in Ecuador and the United States for 17 years, pitting forest tribes and villagers against one of the largest American corporations.
Eleven people are in various stages of appeal on death row, including two who have been there for two decades.
If the judge in the nonjury trial convicts the defendants, two stages of appeal are available to them.
"I believe there are still three stages of appeal," he said, "and we're convinced that no stoning will actually take place".
There are now 19 men on federal death row under sentence of death, 14 of them black, but their cases are in various stages of appeal, and it is unlikely that any execution dates will be set this year.
The study looked at all three possible stages of appeal -- direct appeal to a state's highest court, what is known as post-conviction review, usually by the original trial judge, and habeas corpus review, under which convictions in state courts are reviewed for error in federal courts.
Besides lacking these offices, which pay lawyers a salary to specialize in defending the poor, Texas, unlike Illinois and most other states, also has no office that specializes in representing those sentenced to death in the later stages of appeal, a process called post-conviction review.
Keeping open the lawsuits in the U.S. likely doesn't indicate a desire to continue the legal battle in that market, however, as both cases currently ongoing in the U.S. are in various stages of appeal, meaning that their ultimate resolution could finally bury the hatchet between the two device makers (though the lack of any licensing agreements mean tensions could flare up again in the future).
Twenty-two yeafterfthe the crime, he said, he is still in the early stages of appeal.
