Justices Again Refuse Guantanamo Bay Cases

For the second time in a month, the Supreme Court decided yesterday not to hear appeals from terrorism suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, refusing to call a halt to the military commissions they face after Congress authorized the trials last fall.

The court rejected an appeal by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden who won a landmark Supreme Court case, and Omar Khadr, a Canadian charged in the killing of an Army medic in Afghanistan. They are the only two of about 385 detainees at the U.S. naval base who have been charged with terrorism crimes and are facing military trials.

The justices' decision not to take the appeals of Hamdan and Khadr came less than one year after they struck down the system of military tribunals that the Bush administration had devised to try suspected members of al-Qaeda. Ruling in Hamdan's first case, the court found that the tribunals lacked a basis in federal statute and violated international human rights law.

As a result, the then-Republican-controlled Congress adopted the Military Commissions Act, which authorized the trials and made clear that non-citizens held on foreign soil are not entitled access to U.S. courts to challenge their detention.

In his current case, Hamdan was attempting to persuade the Supreme Court to allow him to bypass the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which has ruled recently against Khadr and other detainees contesting their imprisonment as "enemy combatants."

Three members of the court -- Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer -- said they would hear the appeal. Court rules require the agreement of four of the nine justices to accept a case.

The same three justices dissented in early April from the court's decision not to hear cases involving two groups of Guantanamo Bay detainees who have not been charged but seek access to federal courts to challenge their imprisonment.

Also yesterday, the court decided to review a Texas death penalty case laced with intricate questions of presidential power and international law.

The case involves Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican citizen who was sentenced in 1994 to die for his role in the rape and murder the previous year of two teenage girls in Houston.

Medellin is one of 51 Mexican nationals on death row in U.S. prisons who were covered by a ruling in 2004 by the International Court of Justice. That court ruled that the condemned were entitled to hearings to reconsider their convictions and sentences, because when they were arrested they were not offered access to Mexican diplomats, as required under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

After that ruling, President Bush announced that the United States would not be bound by that provision of the Vienna Convention in future cases, but he ordered state courts to comply by granting the new hearings, including to Medellin.

In November, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Bush had overstepped his constitutional authority by compelling state courts to conduct the hearings and denied Medellin a new hearing.

Medellin appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided without comment to consider the case during the term starting in October.