Judgment Day

Capital Defense Weekly has this interesting piece about a host of cert denials from Texas in the aftermath of Medellin.

7 Mexican-born inmates on Texas’ death row lost their bids for appeal Monday before the U.S. Supreme Court, following the court’s ruling last week that another Mexican-born inmate’s case couldn’t be reopened despite an order from President Bush.

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Kent Scheidegger, author of the blog Crime and Consequences, provides an interesting piece here on the impact of the Medellin v. Texas case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court two days ago.

Despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Supreme Court's decision in Medellin v. Texas, the holding is not all that remarkable. It has long been established that not all treaties are self-executing, and the Court held that the ones at issue here are not, based on their own language. Where adherence to a treaty is contrary to a statute, the President cannot override the statute unilaterally, but legislation is required. Far from making America a rogue nation, placement of the responsibility for treaty compliance in the political branches and not the judiciary is quite common in the world.

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The U.S. Supreme Court has ended any hope Texas murderer Jose Ernesto Medellin had of further extending his delay of execution. This press release below by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation provides the history (and more) of Medellin v. Texas:

Texas murderer Jose Ernesto Medellin, who has benefited from a legal drama over the rights of foreign nationals sentenced to death for murder in the United States, has lost his bid for additional delay of his execution. A United States Supreme Court decision announced today in Medellin v. Texas ends a legal dispute involving the World Court, Supreme Court, the state of Texas, and the President. This dispute has extended the litigation over Medellin’s sentence for several years after it normally would have ended.
The Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a California-based group which filed a “friend of the court” brief on behalf of the family of one of the two teenaged girls raped and murdered by Medellin, had argued in support of today’s decision.

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