PROSECUTING a killer for a capital crime is a sticky wicket. Things get even stickier when the defendant is from another country. Oklahoma prosecutors are well aware of this.
The issue of international law's bearing on U.S. death penalty cases is again front and center, this time in Texas with the case of Humberto Leal Garcia Jr., a Mexican national whose execution is scheduled this week. Garcia is one of three dozen or so Mexicans on death rows around the country.
Gerardo Valdez, sentenced to die in an Oklahoma court for a 1989 Anadarko murder, isn't among the death row denizens. Had he not won a legal battle to avoid a lethal injection, Valdez likely would have been executed. Instead his sentence was commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A Vietnamese man, Hung Thanh Le, didn't escape the needle. The killer was executed in 2004 despite an appeal from the Vietnamese government.
At issue in the cases of Garcia, Valdez and Osbaldo Torres, another Oklahoma killer from Mexico, is the right of foreign nationals to seek legal assistance from their consulates. The three defendants weren't afforded this right. The sticky wicket is whether foreign nationals accused of murder should have access to better, more expensive legal counsel than the average U.S. citizen who's charged with a capital crime. The latter often must rely on public defenders, whose offices are poorly funded.
Poor Mexican nationals have no means to hire high-dollar lawyers, but they're supposed to get help from their own governments, providing resources to perhaps help establish why a killer shouldn't have been charged with a capital crime.
Mexico hasn't executed its own killers since 1961. It officially abolished the death penalty in 2005. Government policy in Mexico, a country that has no problem with blood sports such as bullfighting, is to oppose capital punishment for its citizens convicted of murder — regardless of where the crime took place.
Valdez avoided the needle after months of legal wrangling when Frank Keating was governor of Oklahoma. Keating declined a request to commute the sentence, but Valdez found favor with an appeals court. Keating's successor, Brad Henry, commuted the sentence of Torres, whose execution was stayed by the governor amid pressure from international groups.
Le, though, was executed March 23, 2004, after a last meal of eggs rolls and fried rice.
Executing foreign nationals is a side issue to the ongoing immigration debate. While it may stick in your craw that an illegal immigrant has access to better counsel than a citizen, the bearing of international law on this matter should be taken seriously.
We just wish our federal government would take the issue of illegal immigration more seriously.
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