It’s not racist if every single person who is arrested is asked questions that might have some relationship to nationality, which for that matter is not the same thing as asking about lawful U.S. immigration status. Hell, two of my four grandparents were not U.S.-born, and even now I have no idea what their immigration status was (long story). One was born in Latvia and came to the U.S. as an infant, and the other was born in Canada and came to the U.S. as a teenager. You’d never have guessed by looking at or talking to them that they were not born in the U.S. There are millions of U.S. residents who are not citizens, many of them here perfectly legally as permanent residents or otherwise.
Asking about birthplace or nationality does not necessarily mean you are trying to figure out who is here legally, or that you’re singling out brown people – as I have said many, many times before, the devil is in the details. And for that matter, when I worked in Immigration Court, the second most common foreign language interpreter we needed to order? Yep, Polish.
Can you see the difference between a chair and a laser beam?
I ask because it appears that the game is to name things that have no relation to any subject under discussion, such as you did when you asked about “officers asking about the immigration status of random people they encounter on the street,” a description that has nothing to do with any Arizona law at all.
So let me ask you a question:
Suppose the officers routinely ask people if they are citizens of the United States when they first enounter them in any situation in which the person is suspected of some wrongdoing. And suppose the individual is here illegally but lies, claiming United States citizenship, in an effort to avoid deportation.
Has the United States met its obligations under the Vienna Convention?
The first appeals court to consider his appeal knows, because they judge it to be harmless error. That is, even if he had consular assistance at that point, there was no meaningful probablity that his conviction could have been avoided.
Why make the officer have to determine nationality at all? At some point when the detainee is being read his/her rights, include the statement: “If you are the citizen of a country other than the U.S., you have the right to contact your country’s consulate.” Include that statement for all people, and suddenly no one is making assumptions about nationality and bonus: the U.S. gets to abide by at least one part of one treaty.
Technically it wasn’t retroactive. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations was signed in 1963. Garcia’s crimes were committed in 1994. The International Court of Justice issued a decision in 2004 that said that the treaty had been violated in cases like Garcia’s. The United States Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the International Court’s decision was binding in the United States.
…and wanting to lock people in cages should be left to kidnappers. And fines are kinda sorta like armed robbery, even – in that we shouldn’t want to fine or jail or execute innocent folks, but guilty people like Garcia are astoundingly legitimate targets.
No problem with that as far as I’m concerned … but it wouldn’t have made any difference in this case, since the confession was obtained before the accused was in custody, and therefore he was not read any rights at all before he inculpated himself.
That must have been a schizophrenic Court in 2008, to write that decision in Medellin, and then write whatever you were thinking of. What case was it you were thinking of?
There is a reasonable argument to be made that the treaty is self executing. I don’t think any of the other arguments made here are reasonable, especially in light of the backlash against the Arizona nationality-status law.
I read somewhere that the intent when ratified was that the treaty was self-executing. So I’d say it’s pretty reasonable, too. However, Medellin says differently, so it’s not self-executing.
Even without federal law implementing the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (Art. 36 specifically), the State Department advises State/Local law enforcement to comply with it. They also give advice on how to comply with it if you’re unsure if someone is a foreign national (they don’t claim to be one, they don’t have a passport or greencard, ect.). State Department Website: Lots of fun links to click on (mostly PDF’s).
From one link: When unsure, ask “Are you a US Citizen?” Seems pretty straightforward.
Sigh. I was trying to summarize the timeline not deliver a legal treatise. Okay, what the Supreme Court said in 2008 was that the International Court’s decision was binding in the United States if certain other provisions were also met.
They almost certainly did, at which point he should have been informed of his right to consular access. As I pointed out above, though, it wouldn’t have made any difference because he’d already confessed.
In the long discussions about the Arizona law, I said that police could handle that law by doing the same thing: asking everyone they encounter if the person were an American citizen.
Many people felt this was a poor idea, and even envisioned handing out flyers to the illegal immigrant community advising them to lie and say they were citizens in response to this query.
So my question is: to all those who though that such a response was a good idea in the context of the Arizona law, do you agree that the US state or federal officials meet their Vienna Convention requirement by asking this question?
I note that the 27th amendment to the Constitution was introduced in 1789, and ratified in 1992. Should the Court have deferred consideration of questions arising from Congressional salaries pending passage of the amendment for the whole of the 204 years it was working its way through the process?
Let me clarify, the State Department only advises to ask that question once someone has been arrested/detained/booked. So I don’t think it’s proper to ask everyone the police encounters (nor required by Vienna Convention Art. 36).
The Constitution says “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.”
Now to a simple person like me, this appears to say that treaties are law and judges are bound by them. There’s nothing in the Constitution about a treaty being self-executing or non-self-executing. I’d be tempted to believe that the majority in the Medellin decision used a process of “making it up” but I am repeatedly assured that these justices never make thing up and base their decisions exclusively on the text of the Constitution. So I must assume I have an abridged Constitution that doesn’t include the part that discusses non-self-executing treaties.