St. Louis CofCC Blog

Baltimore Sun:

Texas has wanted to put Jose Medellin to death for a long time. It looks like the state is going to get its way.

The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday sided with Texas against the Bush administration in a highly charged dispute over whether international treaty obligations can affect state criminal proceedings.

In a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court rejected the administration’s claim that Texas should abide by a ruling from a world court that Medellin merited a new trial. Medellin is a Mexican native who has lived most of his life in the United States.

In 1993, Medellin and a gang of boys in Houston attacked, raped and murdered two teenage girls walking home. He was arrested, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death.

After Medellin was convicted, Mexico brought suit in the International Court of Justice, the judicial body of the United Nations, charging that the U.S. had violated the Vienna Convention. That treaty requires that foreign nationals arrested in a signatory country be allowed to meet with a consular official from their home country. It’s a tool treasured by diplomats, American and otherwise, worldwide.

(snip)

Texas state courts have found repeatedly that under state law, Medellin has no right to challenge his conviction and sentence, even if the Vienna treaty was violated. There is no dispute that Medellin wasn’t notified of his treaty rights when he was arrested, but the state has argued he failed to raise that objection at trial, forfeiting the claim.

It’s tempting to think that this ruling means that SCOTUS loves the 10th Amendment and/or is suspicious of the reach of foreign treaties and their deleterious effects on the Bill of Rights.  But I’m not reading any of this into their decision.  All I think it means is that SCOTUS doesn’t think that the circumstances of the Medellin trial violate the terms of the Vienna Convention, and therefore President Bush had no authority to “mess with Texas.”  It’s not that they’re saying that Texas’s states’ rights supersede the Vienna Convention.

I do find it interesting that SCOTUS ignores internationalist reasoning here, but the same SCOTUS used the concept of world opinion to eliminate the death penalty for people under the age of 18 several years back.