Pfizer, the giant pharmaceutical company, announced that they have blocked the sale of its products to ensure that none are used in lethal injections (http://nyti.ms/24QCuGi). Either in a moral or business decision, this is a milestone in the narrative of the death penalty in the United States.

I can talk about the death penalty from a personal experience and perspective. About ten years ago, I was the Press Attaché of the Consulate General of Mexico in Houston. As a Mexican officer abroad, one of my duties at that time was to work in a communications campaign, crafted by the Mexican government, to halt the executions of more than 50 Mexicans sentenced to death in the United States, most of them in South Texas.

I want to make this clear: the campaign was not about to defend their innocence, the focus was to fight the way they got the death penalty.

In most cases in Texas, they got sentenced to death because they were represented by ineffective and inexperienced lawyers —assigned by the court and paid by the state of Texas— that presented their cases full of inconsistencies and didn’t give them proper legal counseling.

The biggest issue was that local authorities never notified the Mexicans accused of their right to contact the Mexican Embassy or Consulate at the moment of their arrest. This, according to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations —an agreement signed by Mexico and the United States among other nations in 1963—, is a full and clear violation of the treaty, which eliminated the chance to give them the proper protection from the Mexican government and a better legal representation at the time of their trial.

As the campaign went on, I realized the ineffectiveness of the death penalty. It does not reduce crime at any level and the justice system is totally biased. The majority of the convicted to death are blacks and Hispanics, among other reasons, because they do not have the ways and means to defend themselves; instead they get the kind of lawyers I mentioned above, not to mention how expensive the whole death penalty process is for taxpayers in Texas. This doesn’t make justice of any kind for anyone.

The New York Times in a recent editorial (http://nyti.ms/1N3KIAs) mentioned the role of race and prejudice in death penalty cases. The newspaper called it “arbitrary as ever” because of racial discrimination, bad lawyering, geographical variations or other factors.

We live in difficult and complicated times and this may not seem relevant, but now we have a presidential candidate calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “criminals.” In an American justice system so biased, what can we expect when a presidential candidate said something like this?

I am aware that the death penalty is a very sensitive issue, not only in the United States, but in my native Mexico as well, but I am convinced that the death penalty does not solve anything.

In the upcoming months we will witness a very dirty presidential campaign, and social issues in this country are making the front page of the main newspapers in a constant basis. I don’t know the ethics reasoning of Pfizer´s decision, but for me makes a lot of sense. I don’t think many companies would like to be linked with such topics at delicate times like now.

Staying away of the death penalty debate will allow Pfizer to stay on top of things with a sound, clear and congruent image, reaffirming the mission and values of the company. What they did today really elevates the good image of Pfizer. It was a very good call.