Texas still plans to execute killer despite U.N. order

From the Houston Chronicle:

The petition sought to halt executions to allow for review of the killers' cases to determine whether denying them access to the Mexican Consulate after arrest harmed their trial defenses.

The Geneva Convention stipulates that, upon request, an alien offender's national consulate must be notified of an arrest.

In its order, the world court quotes the Mexican government's argument that "Texas has made clear that unless restrained, it will go forward with the execution without providing Mr. Medellin the mandated review and reconsideration," which will "irreparably" breach the U.S. government's obligations to the court's 2004 order.

And

Perry's office dismissed the argument.

"The world court has no standing in Texas and Texas is not bound by a ruling or edict from a foreign court," Perry spokesman Robert Black said.

"It is easy to get caught up in discussions of international law and justice and treaties. It's very important to remember that these individuals are on death row for killing our citizens."

Medellin, 33, was condemned for the 1993 killings of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, who stumbled into a drunken midnight gang initiation rite at T.C. Jester Park in north Houston.

And

International law expert Sarah Cleveland, a professor of human and constitutional rights at New York City's Columbia Law School, said in an e-mail that if the U.S. fails to act on the world court order, other countries may follow suit.

"This can only come back to hurt U.S. citizens when they are detained abroad," she wrote.

" ... When a global leader like the U.S. refuses to comply with its clear international legal obligations (and everyone agrees that this is a clear legal obligation), it undermines the willingness of other states to comply with their own obligations and it inspires them not to trust us to obey ours."

Click here for the rest.

Never mind, for a moment, Medellin's crime, which is horrific, and screams for justice. Never mind also, for a moment, the fact that state sanctioned murder, a.k.a. "capital punishment," of anybody, is at the very least hypocritical, and at the very worst a much greater injustice than any street thug could ever perpetrate. Focus, for a moment, on that last little bit of the excerpt above: we don't sign treaties with other nations as some sort of abstract, intellectual exercise; compliance, or lack thereof, with international agreements has real world, physical consequences.

This absurd case out of my home state is nothing more than an expression of several strains of some very old school conservative bullshit. For starters, as observed in the article, there is the US Supreme Court decision nullifying President Bush's order that Texas hold off the execution until the consulate issue can be investigated--apparently, says the Supreme Court, Bush must have Congressional permission to do such a thing, which is weird because the treaty placing such issues under the jurisdiction of the World Court has already been approved, long ago, by Congress, and ratified treaties, according to the US Constitution, are the law of the land. But this is not surprising: Chief Justice John Roberts, conservative asshole extraordinaire, wrote the decision, and American asshole conservatives usually have very little respect for the World Court, or treaties, or international relationships in general that are not dominated by the US.

And nowhere is contempt for the United Nations and its affiliated Word Court stronger than in Texas. Did you notice how casually Governor Perry asserted that "Texas is not bound by a ruling or edict from a foreign court"? The World Court is not a "foreign court." And Perry knows that. The World Court is a body established by treaty, to which the US is a signatory, existing to arbitrate problematic issues arising from adherence to treaty dictates. That is, Texas, like all US states, is indeed bound by edicts from the World Court. Clearly, Perry's conservative disgust with the United Nations makes it okay for him to straight up lie about the legal issues here. And by that, I mean it is not okay for him to lie.

Throw in Texas' traditional blood lust for criminals, especially the non-white ones, and we have this absurdist fucked up situation.

In a very real sense, this isn't at all about foreign nationals committing crimes in the US. It's the exact opposite: it's about how US citizens abroad are treated by criminal justice systems in foreign nations. It would be an astoundingly bad idea to allow right-wing redneck xenophobic sentiment to determine whether we investigate Medellin's consular access. We are bound by a ratified treaty to investigate this. And we'd better fucking do it if we value our citizens' lives.

Ever seen Midnight Express?

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