Justices consider rights of detainees
Consular access cases are heard

By Charles Lane, Washington Post  |  March 30, 2006

WASHINGTON -- On a December night in 1997, a Honduran man swung a baseball bat
and killed James Merry outside a Popeye's restaurant in Springfield, Va. Mario
Bustillo was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years.

That local slaying has evolved into a Supreme Court case with major implications
for the rights of 21.1 million noncitizens in the United States, as well as for
US international relations.

At issue is the Vienna Convention on consular access, an agreement among the
United States and 160 other nations that guarantees foreign detainees access to
diplomats from their home country. In oral arguments at the court yesterday, a
lawyer for Bustillo told the justices that his conviction should be overturned
because Virginia authorities never informed him of his Vienna Convention rights.

As a result of the delay, Mark Stancil said, Bustillo, who maintains another man
from his home country is the real killer, was denied ''critical exculpatory
evidence in the possession of the Honduran government."

The Vienna Convention issue has generated several difficult cases for the court
in recent years, and the Bustillo case offers the justices a chance to clarify
the domestic effect of treaties, which the Constitution says are part of ''the
supreme law of the land."

A ruling in Bustillo's favor could affect relations between millions of
noncitizens and local law enforcement, whose knowledge of and compliance with
the Vienna Convention is spotty. It would be a defeat for the Bush
administration, which says the convention should be enforced through diplomatic
negotiations.

But it would represent a major step toward incorporating international law into
US domestic affairs -- as several justices have been urging in recent years.

In a companion case, a lawyer for Moises Sanchez-Llamas, a Mexican convicted of
trying to kill a police officer in Oregon, said his client's statements to
police should not have been admitted as evidence because they were obtained
without notifying him of his Vienna Convention rights.

None of the justices seemed eager to embrace that claim, but they appeared more
evenly divided on the two men's basic contention that the Vienna Convention
creates individual rights that can be enforced by lawsuits in a US court.

Ratified by the United States in 1969, the convention commits signatories to
provide one another's citizens access to consular officials if they are arrested
and to inform detainees of these ''rights" ''without delay."

The two cases argued yesterday raise the issue of whether the international
court's interpretation of the Vienna Convention should essentially be binding on
all 50 states.

Backed both by the Bush administration and by 28 other states, Virginia and
Oregon counter that neither the treaty nor the international court's ruling can
trump the states' own rules of criminal procedure.

To decide that noncitizens can belatedly raise Vienna Convention claims, they
argue, would give noncitizens a right that Americans do not have with regard to
claims under the Constitution, and that is denied to Americans by governments
abroad.

The cases are Bustillo v. Johnson and Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon. A decision is
expected by July.