By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
A complex dispute over international law in U.S. death-penalty cases headed back to the state courts yesterday, as the Supreme Court dismissed the case of a Mexican death row inmate who says Texas violated his rights under a U.S.-ratified treaty by trying and sentencing him without first giving him access to diplomats from his home country.
In a brief, unsigned opinion, the court said it would be "unwise" for it to resolve the case now -- both because new procedural issues have cropped up and because President Bush has instructed state courts to hold new hearings for the Mexican, Jose Ernesto Medellin, and 50 others, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ordered last year.
It was a victory of sorts for the Bush administration, which had been eager to prevent the matter from coming to a head at the Supreme Court.
The issue of U.S. compliance with the ICJ had attracted worldwide attention, much of it unfavorable, to the Bush administration's perceived unilateralism in world affairs. It also had irritated President Vicente Fox of Mexico and had sparked disputes within the administration between supporters and opponents of international law.
The Justice Department finessed the situation with the unusual proposal for a presidential instruction to the states -- just a month before the March 28 oral argument in the case.
To avoid such cases in the future, the administration then said the United States would no longer be bound by the ICJ's rulings on its compliance with the Vienna Conventions, the consular access treaty that Medellin contends was violated in his case.
Medellin's lawyers have already filed papers in Texas seeking to enforce the president's determination, which was issued on Feb. 28. The case will now go forward, with the possibility of Supreme Court review once Texas litigation concludes.
The court's decision yesterday has the effect of giving Texas's courts first crack at a major question of constitutional law: whether Bush had the power to issue his Feb. 28 determination.
Texas has already said no. It argued in a Supreme Court brief that its former governor is attempting to impose on a sovereign state not only his will but also the will of a foreign court.
The ICJ ruled last year that the United States had violated Medellin's rights and should provide him with a new sentencing hearing.
A ruling by the Supreme Court enforcing the ICJ's decision would have laid an important precedent in favor of the authority of international law generally. But Texas noted that Medellin forfeited his right to invoke the Vienna Conventions by not asserting it until 1998, rather than at his trial in 1994.
In February, however, Bush intervened in this looming clash between global law and Texas law, issuing a determination that he alone, as the country's chief diplomat, has the power to decide how the country should react to the international court's rulings. He instructed state courts to give the Mexicans new hearings, as the ICJ had proposed, and told the Supreme Court it should bow out.
Yesterday's opinions showed that four of the justices -- John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer -- preferred to maintain federal jurisdiction over the case even as it returned to the Texas courts.
But Justice Sandra Day O'Connor refused to join them. She argued instead the court should rule now that the case should be sent back to the federal appeals court for Texas, rather than to the state courts.
Ginsburg, however, felt that the state courts could well make the federal case moot. There being fewer than five votes for a stay, Ginsburg decided to join Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas in dismissing the case, because, she wrote, that offers the least risk of "disturbance" to the case Medellin's lawyers have already started in the Texas courts.
The case is Medellin v. Dretke, No. 04-5928.
In another death-penalty case yesterday, the court ruled that the Constitution forbids the routine visible shackling of convicted murderers when they sit in front of a jury that is deciding whether to impose capital punishment.
The decision was the court's first opportunity to address a courtroom security issue since the recent killing of a judge by a rape defendant in Georgia.
The law has long prohibited the visible shackling of defendants at trial, except when the court makes a formal finding that a particular defendant would pose a threat to security. Yesterday's 7 to 2 decision extended that rule to the sentencing phase of a capital case.
To put even a convicted felon before the jury in chains, the court ruled, would unfairly make him appear uncontrollably dangerous, the court ruled.
"The appearance of the offender during the penalty phase in shackles, however, almost inevitably implies to a jury, as a matter of common sense, that court authorities consider the offender a danger to the community . . . nearly always a relevant factor in jury decisionmaking," Breyer wrote for the court.
Breyer was joined by all other justices except Thomas and Scalia.
Breyer wrote that the court is "mindful of the tragedy that can result if judges are not able to protect themselves and their courtrooms," but that this could not outweigh the right of an offender to a fair sentencing hearing.
Thomas wrote that the court's opinion "leaves no real room for ensuring the safety of the courtroom." Joined by Scalia, he said that it is unrealistic to suggest that an offender's image would be damaged more by shackling than it already had been by his conviction.
The case is Deck v. Missouri , No. 04-5293.