Texas is safer today
From the Houston Chronicle...
The state of Texas defied an international court and executed Jose Ernesto Medellin late Tuesday after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution for the killer in the 1993 Houston gang rape-murders of two teenage girls.
Medellin, 33, was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 9:57 p.m., nine minutes after receiving the fatal cocktail and nearly four hours after his scheduled 6 p.m. execution....
There's some hoopla about the execution because Medellin claims that he said he was Mexican, and the authorities didn't tell him he was allowed to contact the Mexican consulate. We're being warned that US citizens in foreign countries won't have full protection since we didn't postpone this creep's execution after the UN demanded we do.
Except Americans don't have protection....
On the verge of exposing a police-run narcotics ring in Durham, Ontario, [Scott] Loper was discovered by the ring and imprisoned for four years on extorted charges.
Denied his rights to U.S. Consulate protection under the Vienna Convention, Loper was tortured to the point where he often questioned his ability to make it out alive....
The Canadian government originally said the whole thing, including Loper's arrest, never happened, denying that Loper had ever lived in Canada, let alone been incarcerated there.
Had Loper been unable to produce evidence of his imprisonment, the denial would have succeeded. Loper had that evidence, which he had stuffed into his jeans as he was being released.
The Canadian government (the same people who denied he'd been imprisoned) claim Loper waived his rights to contact the US consulate, but can provide no proof of that.
So, apparently, we're being asked to get all in a lather because a murdering rapists may not have been reminded that he could contact the Mexican consulate, while a US citizen, jailed on false charges was kept from contacting the US consulate.
Did Medellin have a motive to not tell the authorities he was a Mexican citizen? Yes, because he was here illegally. Did Loper have motive to waive his right to contact the US consulate? No, because he knew the charges were false, and would have wanted all the help he could get.
From the Houston Chronicle article...
Sandra Babcock, a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago and an attorney for Medellin, said the case was not just about one Mexican national on death row.
"It's also about ordinary Americans who count on the protections of the consulate when they travel abroad in strange lands," she said. "It's about the reputation of the U.S. as a nation that adheres to the rule of law."
I'd like to hear whether Babcock has lifted a finger to help Scott Loper, or is even aware that other countries ignore the treaty she's claiming we have to place above our laws. In the end state's right triumphed since while the US may have a treaty with these nations that ignore it, but Texas doesn't, so they put Jose Medellin out of our misery.
Posted by Danny Carlton at August 6, 2008 8:29 AM