In one of the most important international-law decisions in its history, the Supreme Court on Tuesday restored the Constitution’s prudent balance between politics and law in the quintessentially political arena of foreign affairs. Doing so, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion concurrently provided individual justice for murder victims, vindication for the rights of states to democratic self-determination, and a searing reminder of why presidential elections — which can chart the high Court’s course for a generation — are crucially important.

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The case, Medellin v. Texas, involved the brutal gang-rape murders of two teenagers by a Mexican national, Jose Ernesto Medellin. The defendant confessed to the murders after being given Miranda warnings. Police in Houston, however, neglected to inform him of his right, under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to have the Mexican consulate notified of his arrest. Medellin was nonetheless vigorously represented by counsel at trial, after which he was duly convicted and sentenced to death. The notification failure was so inconsequential that Medellin’s counsel failed to raise it at trial or on appeal.

Even fundamental constitutional rights — rights whose assertion might actually have made a difference in the outcome — are deemed waived if not asserted in a timely manner. Thus, years later, when Medellin claimed for the first time to have been prejudiced by the lack of consular notification, his habeas corpus petition was summarily rejected by state and federal courts due to his procedural default. Like many countries, however, Mexico objects to the death-penalty. It therefore sued the United States in the International Court of Justice (i.e., the U.N.’s judicial arm) on behalf of Medellin and 50 other Mexican murderers on death-row in states said similarly to have overlooked consular notification obligations.

In its 2004 Avena decision, the ICJ ruled in Mexico’s favor and presumed to direct American courts to reconsider the murder convictions. Two years later, though, in Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, the Supreme Court rejected this ICJ directive, holding that the Vienna Convention did not supersede state procedural default rules.

Inexplicably, the Bush administration entered the fray on behalf of the Mexican murderers. President Bush, through a memorandum to then–Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, purported to direct state courts to “give effect to the [Avena] decision.” Armed with the memo, Medellin again pressed for reversal. Again, he was turned away by the courts of Texas.


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