Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, Texas death row inmate Heliberto Chi, a Honduran national, will be executed tonight.
Chi’s scheduled execution comes two days after the execution of Mexican national Jose Medellin, who was convicted of the 1993 brutal gang rape and murder of two Houston teens. And as in the Medellin case, the controversy over whether Chi should be executed tonight turns on a question of the U.S. obligation to enforce an international treaty – in this case, an 81-year-old agreement between the U.S. and Honduras.
To recap: International law scholars and public officials – both here and in Mexico – sought to intervene in Medellin’s case, arguing that executing Medellin would violate the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which the U.S. is a party. The VCCR guarantees the right of foreign nationals abroad to have access to consular officials in the event of an arrest or other detention. In Medellin’s case, Mexican officials were not alerted to his arrest or prosecution until after he was convicted, when Medellin wrote to them from his cell. Medellin’s case was included in a law suit filed by Mexico in the U.N.’s International Court of Justice, which ultimately sided with Mexico, ruling that the U.S. had violated the rights of 51 Mexican nationals on death row in the U.S. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled that the VCCR was not a self-executing treaty and thus, absent an act of Congress making it applicable to the state’s, there was no requirement that the state courts heed the ICJ decision.
Medellin was executed Aug. 5.
Now, lawyers for Chi are arguing to the Supremes that his execution should be stayed because when it comes to the rights of Honduran nationals, the U.S. is bound by a self-executing bilateral treaty signed specifically to ensure consular relations between the two countries. The Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Consular Rights, signed on Dec. 7, 1927, is in fact a U.S. law, argues Terence O’Rourke, who is acting as counsel to the Republic of Honduras in Chi’s case. The violation of international law in Chi’s case is actually worse than in Medellin’s because of the 1927 treaty, he says. “If the state of Texas … executes Heliberto Chi, it will be engaged in an unlawful killing.”
Chi was sentenced to death for the 2001 murder of Arlington clothing-store manager Armand Paliotta, for whom Chi had previously worked as a tailor. Chi spent six weeks on the lam before he was found in Los Angeles, Calif., and brought back to Texas.
Chi’s lawyers are asking the Supremes to stay the execution to give them a chance to “vindicate the [U.S.’s] plainly compelling interest in complying with its binding treaty obligations.” A similar request filed yesterday with Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals was denied. (You can read more about Chi’s appeal here.)
This article appears in August 1 • 2008.