But the sovereignty restoration movement has not been limited to Britain. All across the world, from Viktor Orbán in Hungary to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Donald J. Trump right here in the United States, many nations have recently elected national leaders who have run on an express political platform of recapturing the national interest from the unaccountable clutches of the international community. And as recent books by Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony and National Review editor Rich Lowry have both detailed, the intellectual battle between nationalism and transnationalism has perhaps never been more front and center in the public eye than it is now.
Defending U.S. sovereignty has been a deep passion of mine for decades. And of all the cases I’ve ever litigated at the Supreme Court, one stands out as my favorite—as the most complex, the most fascinating, and by far the most consequential.
It was a case that goes to the heart of sovereignty. In Medellín v. Texas, we successfully defended the sovereignty of both the United States and the great state of Texas against the United Nations and its judicial arm, the World Court. And we stood up to a president—from my own party—to ensure that no president, Democrat or Republican, can ever give away U.S. sovereignty. We turn now to that story.
What started with a horrific crime of violence evolved into a case that spanned decades and drew in ninety foreign nations, the World Court, and the president of the United States.
One hot, muggy summer evening, June 24, 1993, two teenage girls in Houston, Texas, were walking home and decided to take a shortcut. Around 11:15 p.m., they encountered the “Black and Whites Gang,” who had assembled to initiate a new member. As the girls walked past, José Ernesto Medellín and his fellow gang members grabbed them, assaulted them, brutally raped them, and then murdered them both.
I grew up in Houston. Houston is a big city that has seen quite a bit of violent crime. Yet this crime shocked the conscience of the city. The horror and brutality those gang members unleashed on a fourteen-year-old girl and on a sixteen-year-old girl was unspeakable.
Later that evening, Medellín bragged to the family of another gang member about how proud he was of their horrific crime. He boasted about how he and his brother had kept a ring and a Disney watch as trophies of their crime.
Five days later, Medellín and his compatriots were arrested. And hours later, he hand-wrote a detailed confession to the crime. It remains one of the most bone-chilling things I have ever had the displeasure of reading. Without remorse, without hint of human compassion, he meticulously described how each girl had pleaded for her life prior to being brutally murdered.
Given his written confession and the overwhelming evidence of guilt, Medellín unsurprisingly was tried and convicted of murder during the course of a sexual assault—a capital offense. He was sentenced to death.
Years after his conviction, Medellín raised a brand-new issue in the case. It so happened that José Ernesto Medellín was a foreign national. He was born in Mexico, illegally immigrated to the United States, and lived in the United States for most of his life. So despite the fact that he grew up in America and could speak, read, and write English, he technically remained a Mexican national.
Under a treaty called the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, every foreign national located in a nation that is a signatory to that treaty has a right to contact the consulate of his home country if he is charged with a serious crime and to receive assistance from his home country’s consulate.
At his trial, Medellín never raised this issue, so the prosecutors never afforded him his right to contact the Mexican consulate. The first time Medellín raised the issue was in federal court in what is called a habeas corpus challenge. Federal criminal cases can be complicated, and death penalty cases are notoriously long and complex.
The way our criminal justice system works, there are two parallel systems: the state systems of justice and the federal system of justice. State courts are the courts that typically try murder cases. Medellín’s case was tried in Texas state court, and his conviction and death sentence were affirmed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals—the highest criminal court in the state of Texas. But he never raised the issue of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations until his federal habeas challenge—which was years after his criminal conviction in state court.
Habeas challenges are common, but in this case, after Medellín was convicted, the case also took a rather strange turn. The nation of Mexico sued the United States in the International Court of Justice, otherwise known as the World Court, the judicial arm of the United Nations. Mexico sued on behalf of Medellín and fifty other Mexican nationals who had committed murder in the United States and had been sentenced to death by the various state justice systems across the United States. Mexico argued that because those individuals had not been affirmatively told of their treaty right to contact the Mexican consulate, their murder convictions and death sentences must all be set aside.
Remarkably, the World Court agreed and issued an order to the United States to reopen the convictions of fifty-one murderers across the country. This was the first time in history that a foreign court had attempted to bind the U.S. justice system—much less to overturn settled criminal convictions. Medellín, in turn, argued that the U.S. justice system should be bound by the World Court decision. He argued, in effect, that he was legally entitled to a new trial.
Ordinarily, the rules of criminal trials are that defendants are required to affirmatively raise any legal defenses they might have. And the reason the system works this way is that if a criminal defendant raises a particular legal issue or legal defense, the court can appropriately address it right
