Posted on 03/25/2008 9:43:10 AM PDT by indcons
This is very good news. Congrats to the state of Texas, which had to fight the open-borders lobby and the Bush administration all the way to the high court to prevent international law from superseding American sovereignty:
President Bush overstepped his authority when he ordered a Texas court to grant a new hearing to a Mexican on death row for rape and murder, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.
In a case that mixes presidential power, international relations and the death penalty, the court sided with Texas 6-3.
Bush was in the unusual position of siding with death row prisoner Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican citizen whom police prevented from consulting with Mexican diplomats, as provided by international treaty.
An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death row around the United States violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country’s consular officials. The International Court of Justice, also known as the world court, said the Mexican prisoners should have new court hearings to determine whether the violation affected their cases.
Bush, who oversaw 152 executions as Texas governor, disagreed with the decision. But he said it must be carried out by state courts because the United States had agreed to abide by the world court’s rulings in such cases. The administration argued that the president’s declaration is reason enough for Texas to grant Medellin a new hearing.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, disagreed. Roberts said the international court decision cannot be forced upon the states.
The president may not “establish binding rules of decision that pre-empt contrary state law,” Roberts said.
Andy McCarthy summed up the bottom line on this case last fall:
At bottom, the case is about the freedom of Texans to govern themselves, to put sadistic murderers to death if that is what they choose democratically to do, as long as they adhere to American constitutional procedures in carrying out that policy choice. Sure, it offends Mexicans, Europeans, international law professors, and a motley collection of jurists who see themselves as a supra-sovereign tribunal. But that is not a basis for the President to interfere.
The administration has made a great show of promoting democracy. Democracy, however, begins at home.
Don’t you forget it.
***
SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Deniston has more:
The Supreme Court, in a sweeping rejection of claims of power in the presidency, ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that the President does not have the authority to order states to relax their criminal procedures to obey a ruling of the World Court. The decision came in the case of Medellin v. Texas (06-984). Neither a World Court decision requiring U.S. states to provide new review of criminal cases involving foreign nationals, nor a memo by President Bush seeking to enforce the World Court ruling, preempts state law restrictions on challenges to convictions, the Court said in a ruling written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
The decision, aside from its rebuff of presidential power, also treats the World Court ruling itself as not binding on U.S. states, when it contradicts those states’ criminal procedure rules. The international treaty at issue in this dispute — the Vienna Convention that gives foreign nationals accused of crime a right to meet with diplomats from their home country — is not enforceable as a matter of U.S. law, the Roberts opinion said. And the World Court ruling seeking to implement that treaty inside the U.S. is also not binding, and does not gain added legal effect merely because the President sought to tell the states to abide by the decision, the Court added.
The ruling also is a defeat for 51 Mexican nationals who won a World Court decision in 2004, finding that U.S. states had denied them their consular access rights and advising the U.S. government to take steps to enforce the ruling. In the specific case, Mexican national Jose Ernesto Medellin, sought to rely on both the World Court decision and the Bush memo to reopen his case, claiming that he was never given access to any Mexican diplomat while his case was going through Texas state courts.
The Bush Administration did not agree with the World Court ruling, and, in fact, withdrew from the international protocol that gave the World Court the authority to enforce the Vienna Convention. Even so, Bush issued a memo in February 2005, agreeing that the U.S. would seek to obey the World Court, and he told the states involve to “give effect” to that tribunal’s decision. The case thus came to the Court as a major test of presidential authority, in seeking to enforce treaty obligations, to override contradictory state criminal procedure rules. In that test, the presidency clearly lost.
The opinion will be posted here. Transcript of the oral arguments from last fall is here.
>>The important thing is that we have been respectful of one another even though we have a point of disagreement.<<
Yes, and I learned something very important about “This Constitution” vs. “The Constitution” in the Supremacy section.
I think we agree about the most important thing — that at least on something as fundamental as criminal cases, the “World Court’s” rulings cannot contradict “This Constitution,” but the elites are not going to give up trying to undermine our sovereignty.
Nope. It is never equal. Who voted for our SC Chief Justice is a striking difference.
No, you are reading the case too broadly. Look at it again. They talk about different kinds of treaties. The result may be quite different in cases where the treaty is self-executing.
You're right, which is why we need to be so vigilant whenever a treaty is up for ratification.
Thank you so much for this
update. Thank God for Roberts!
In most cases, the proper vote on a treaty is 'no', although there are a few that may have merit.
Just as any American entering a foreign country illegally still has his civil rights in America, the rights he must deal with first in order to exercise those rights are his rights in the country whose laws he became suddenly reliant upon. Definitely two entirely different lists of rights! Should he get lucky and be in a country that allows that ‘call to the US Embassy’ he may get off eventually, otherwise, he gets to play the Hanoi Hilton game! We probably all tend to agree with you that if an illegal alien says he’s mexican, he’ll get a call to the Mexican Embassy/consulate/whatever the nearest option offers. Pretty sure we all agree on that. So some of us aren’t sure where the demarcation line exists in felonies v misdemeanors on that call...and criminal rights of foreigners in general! Much of what this thread offers is ‘opinion’, not fact.
IMO, any foreignor should have the right to call their embassy when arrested in a foreign country. It’s not so much a problem here where we would provide a court appointed attorney to any scum, but there are a lot of shiiteholes in the world where you go into the hole and never come out.
My concern is how Americans will be treated around the world, not how others are treated here, which is always decent. We’ve lost the moral and sometimes legal high ground when we treat foreignors here differently than how we demand Americans be treated abroad.
Even in the shiiholes, Americans entering with Visas are treated with the utmost respect (tho' why an American with decent pedigree would want to travel to some of those 'shiiholes' is beyond me)!
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