Medellin v. Texas

552 U.S. 759

Case Year: 2008

Case Ruling: 6-3, Affirmed

Opinion Justice: Roberts

FACTS

Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican national who had lived in the United States since childhood, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a Texas state court for the gang rape and brutal murders of two Houston teenagers. Medellin was personally responsible for strangling at least one of the girls with her own shoelace. Medellin signed a written confession after he had been read his Miranda rights. Officers, however, did not read him his rights under the Vienna Convention of 1969.

In Case Concerning Avenal and Other Mexican Nationals (2004), the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that the United States had failed to inform Medellin and fifty other Mexican nationals of their rights under the Vienna Convention. The Vienna Convention requires nations to “inform the [detainee] of his righ[t]” to request assistance from the consul of his own state.” The ICJ held that the Mexican nationals were entitled to review of their state-court convictions and sentences.

Relying on the ICJ’s Avena decision and a memorandum from President George W. Bush, Medellin filed a habeas application in Texas to challenge his conviction. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed his application and concluded that neither Avena nor the president’s memo was binding federal law.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide if Avena is directly enforceable as domestic law in the United States and if the president’s memorandum independently requires the states to provide review and reconsideration of the claims of the fifty-one Mexican nationals.

 

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS DELIVERED THE OPINION OF THE COURT.

Medellin first contends that the ICJ’s judgment in Avena constitutes a “binding” obligation on the state and federal courts of the United States. He argues that “by virtue of the Supremacy Clause, the treaties requiring compliance with the Avenajudgment are already the ‘Law of the Land’ by which all state and federal courts in this country are ‘bound.’ ” Accordingly, Medellin argues, Avena is a binding federal rule of decision that preempts contrary state limitations on successive habeas petitions.

No one disputes that the Avena decision--a decision that flows from the treaties through which the United States submitted to ICJ jurisdiction with respect to Vienna Convention disputes--constitutes an international law obligation on the part of the United States. But not all international law obligations automatically constitute binding federal law enforceable in United States courts. . . .

This Court has long recognized the distinction between treaties that automatically have effect as domestic law, and those that--while they constitute international law commitments--do not by themselves function as binding federal law. . . . [W]hile treaties “may comprise international commitments . . . they are not domestic law unless Congress has either enacted implementing statutes or the treaty itself conveys an intention that it be ‘self-executing’ and is ratified on these terms.” . . .

Medellin and his amici nonetheless contend that the Optional Protocol, United Nations Charter, and ICJ Statute supply the “relevant obligation” to give the Avena judgment binding effect in the domestic courts of the United States. Because none of these treaty sources creates binding federal law in the absence of implementing legislation, and because it is uncontested that no such legislation exists, we conclude that the Avena judgment is not automatically binding domestic law.

The interpretation of a treaty, like the interpretation of a statute, begins with its text. Because a treaty ratified by the United States is “an agreement among sovereign powers,” we have also considered as “aids to its interpretation” the negotiation and drafting history of the treaty as well as “the postratification understanding” of signatory nations.

As a signatory to the Optional Protocol, the United States agreed to submit disputes arising out of the Vienna Convention to the ICJ. The Protocol provides: “Disputes arising out of the interpretation or application of the [Vienna] Convention shall lie within the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.” Of course, submitting to jurisdiction and agreeing to be bound are two different things. . . .

The obligation on the part of signatory nations to comply with ICJ judgments derives not from the Optional Protocol, but rather from Article 94 of the United Nations Charter--the provision that specifically addresses the effect of ICJ decisions. Article 94(1) provides that “[e]ach Member of the United Nations undertakes to comply with the decision of the [ICJ] in any case to which it is a party.” The Executive Branch contends that the phrase “undertakes to comply” is not “an acknowledgement that an ICJ decision will have immediate legal effect in the courts of U.N. members,” but rather “acommitment on the part of U.N. Members to take future action through their political branches to comply with an ICJ decision.”

We agree with this construction of Article 94. The Article is not a directive to domestic courts. It does not provide that the United States “shall” or “must” comply with an ICJ decision, nor indicate that the Senate that ratified the U.N. Charter intended to vest ICJ decisions with immediate legal effect in domestic courts. Instead, “[t]he words of Article 94 . . . call upon governments to take certain action.” In other words, the U.N. Charter reads like “a compact between independent nations” that “depends for the enforcement of its provisions on the interest and the honor of the governments which are parties to it.” . .

The U.N. Charter’s provision of an express diplomatic--that is, nonjudicial--remedy is itself evidence that ICJ judgments were not meant to be enforceable in domestic courts. And even this “quintessentially international remed[y],” is not absolute. . . .

In sum, Medellin’s view that ICJ decisions are automatically enforceable as domestic law is fatally undermined by the enforcement structure established by Article 94. . . .

The ICJ Statute, incorporated into the U.N. Charter, provides further evidence that the ICJ’s judgment in Avena does not automatically constitute federal law judicially enforceable in United States courts. To begin with, the ICJ’s “principal purpose” is said to be to “arbitrate particular disputes between national governments.” Accordingly, the ICJ can hear disputes only between nations, not individuals. The dissent does not explain how Medellin, an individual, can be a party to the ICJ proceeding. . . .

It is, moreover, well settled that the United States’ interpretation of a treaty “is entitled to great weight.” The Executive Branch has unfailingly adhered to its view that the relevant treaties do not create domestically enforceable federal law. . . .

As against this time-honored textual approach, the dissent proposes a multifactor, judgment-by-judgment analysis that would “jettiso[n] relative predictability for the open-ended rough-and-tumble of factors.” The dissent’s novel approach to deciding which (or, more accurately, when) treaties give rise to directly enforceable federal law is arrestingly indeterminate. . . .

Our Framers established a careful set of procedures that must be followed before federal law can be created under the Constitution--vesting that decision in the political branches, subject to checks and balances. They also recognized that treaties could create federal law, but again through the political branches, with the President making the treaty and the Senate approving it. . . .

The dissent’s approach risks the United States’ involvement in international agreements. It is hard to believe that the United States would enter into treaties that are sometimes enforceable and sometimes not. Such a treaty would be the equivalent of writing a blank check to the judiciary. Senators could never be quite sure what the treaties on which they were voting meant. . . .

Our conclusion that Avena does not by itself constitute binding federal law is confirmed by the “postratification understanding” of signatory nations. There are currently 47 nations that are parties to the Optional Protocol and 171 nations that are parties to the Vienna Convention. Yet neither Medellin nor his amici have identified a single nation that treats ICJ judgments as binding in domestic courts. . . . . . . Given that ICJ judgments may interfere with state procedural rules, one would expect the ratifying parties to the relevant treaties to have clearly stated their intent to give those judgments domestic effect, if they had so intended. Here there is no statement in the Optional Protocol, the U.N. Charter, or the ICJ Statute that supports the notion that ICJ judgments displace state procedural rules.

Moreover, the consequences of Medellin’s argument give pause. An ICJ judgment, the argument goes, is not only binding domestic law but is also unassailable. As a result, neither Texas nor this Court may look behind a judgment and quarrel with its reasoning or result. Medellin’s interpretation would allow ICJ judgments to override otherwise binding state law; there is nothing in his logic that would exempt contrary federal law from the same fate. And there is nothing to prevent the ICJ from ordering state courts to annul criminal convictions and sentences, for any reason deemed sufficient by the ICJ. Indeed, that is precisely the relief Mexico requested. . . .

. . . While the ICJ’s judgment in Avena creates an international law obligation on the part of the United States, it does not of its own force constitute binding federal law that pre-empts state restrictions on the filing of successive habeas petitions. . . . [A] contrary conclusion would be extraordinary, given that basic rights guaranteed by our own Constitution do not have the effect of displacing state procedural rules. Nothing in the text, background, negotiating and drafting history, or practice among signatory nations suggests that the President or Senate intended the improbable result of giving the judgments of an international tribunal a higher status than that enjoyed by “many of our most fundamental constitutional protections.”

Medellin next argues that the ICJ’s judgment in Avena is binding on state courts by virtue of the President’s February 28, 2005 Memorandum. The United States contends that while the Avena judgment does not of its own force require domestic courts to set aside ordinary rules of procedural default, that judgment became the law of the land with precisely that effect pursuant to the President’s Memorandum and his power “to establish binding rules of decision that preempt contrary state law.” . . .

The United States maintains that the President’s constitutional role “uniquely qualifies” him to resolve the sensitive foreign policy decisions that bear on compliance with an ICJ decision and “to do so expeditiously.” . . . In this case, the President seeks to vindicate United States interests in ensuring the reciprocal observance of the Vienna Convention, protecting relations with foreign governments, and demonstrating commitment to the role of international law. These interests are plainly compelling.

Such considerations, however, do not allow us to set aside first principles. The President’s authority to act, as with the exercise of any governmental power, “must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.”

Justice Jackson’s familiar tripartite scheme [as stated in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer, 1952] provides the accepted framework for evaluating executive action in this area. First, “[w]hen the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.” Second, “[w]hen the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain.” In this circumstance, Presidential authority can derive support from “congressional inertia, indifference or quiescence.” Finally, “[w]hen the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb,” and the Court can sustain his actions “only by disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject.”

The United States marshals two principal arguments in favor of the President’s authority “to establish binding rules of decision that preempt contrary state law.” The Solicitor General first argues that the relevant treaties give the President the authority to implement the Avena judgment and that Congress has acquiesced in the exercise of such authority. The United States also relies upon an “independent” international dispute-resolution power wholly apart from the asserted authority based on the pertinent treaties. Medellin adds the additional argument that the President’s Memorandum is a valid exercise of his power to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

The United States maintains that the President’s Memorandum is authorized by the Optional Protocol and the U.N. Charter. That is, because the relevant treaties “create an obligation to comply with Avena,” they ”implicitly give the President authority to implement that treaty-based obligation.” As a result, the President’s Memorandum is well grounded in the first category of the Youngstown framework.

We disagree. The President has an array of political and diplomatic means available to enforce international obligations, but unilaterally converting a non-self-executing treaty into a self-executing one is not among them. The responsibility for transforming an international obligation arising from a non-self-executing treaty into domestic law falls to Congress. As this Court has explained, when treaty stipulations are “not self-executing they can only be enforced pursuant to legislation to carry them into effect.” . . .

The requirement that Congress, rather than the President, implement a non-self-executing treaty derives from the text of the Constitution, which divides the treaty-making power between the President and the Senate. The Constitution vests the President with the authority to “make” a treaty. If the Executive determines that a treaty should have domestic effect of its own force, that determination may be implemented “in mak[ing]” the treaty, by ensuring that it contains language plainly providing for domestic enforceability. If the treaty is to be self-executing in this respect, the Senate must consent to the treaty by the requisite two-thirds vote, consistent with all other constitutional restraints.

Once a treaty is ratified without provisions clearly according it domestic effect, however, whether the treaty will ever have such effect is governed by the fundamental constitutional principle that “ ‘[t]he power to make the necessary laws is in Congress; the power to execute in the President.’ ” As already noted, the terms of a non-self-executing treaty can become domestic law only in the same way as any other law--through passage of legislation by both Houses of Congress, combined with either the President’s signature or a congressional override of a Presidential veto. . . .

A non-self-executing treaty, by definition, is one that was ratified with the understanding that it is not to have domestic effect of its own force. That understanding precludes the assertion that Congress has implicitly authorized the President--acting on his own--to achieve precisely the same result. We therefore conclude, given the absence of congressional legislation, that the non-self-executing treaties at issue here did not “express[ly] or implied[ly]” vest the President with the unilateral authority to make them self-executing. Accordingly, the President’s Memorandum does not fall within the first category of the Youngstown framework. . . .

. . . As Madison explained in The Federalist No. 47, under our constitutional system of checks and balances, “[t]he magistrate in whom the whole executive power resides cannot of himself make a law.” That would, however, seem an apt description of the asserted executive authority unilaterally to give the effect of domestic law to obligations under a non-self-executing treaty. . . .

In any event, even if we were persuaded that congressional acquiescence could support the President’s asserted authority to create domestic law pursuant to a non-self-executing treaty, such acquiescence does not exist here. The United States first locates congressional acquiescence in Congress’s failure to act following the President’s resolution of prior ICJ controversies. A review of the Executive’s actions in those prior cases, however, cannot support the claim that Congress acquiesced in this particular exercise of Presidential authority, for none of them remotely involved transforming an international obligation into domestic law and thereby displacing state law.

The United States also directs us to the President’s “related” statutory responsibilities and to his “established role” in litigating foreign policy concerns as support for the President’s asserted authority to give the ICJ’s decision in Avena the force of domestic law. Congress has indeed authorized the President to represent the United States before the United Nations, the ICJ, and the Security Council, but the authority of the President to represent the United States before such bodies speaks to the President’s international responsibilities, not any unilateral authority to create domestic law. The authority expressly conferred by Congress in the international realm cannot be said to “invite” the Presidential action at issue here. . . .

We thus turn to the United States’ claim that--independent of the United States’ treaty obligations--the Memorandum is a valid exercise of the President’s foreign affairs authority to resolve claims disputes with foreign nations. The United States relies on a series of cases in which this Court has upheld the authority of the President to settle foreign claims pursuant to an executive agreement. In these cases this Court has explained that, if pervasive enough, a history of congressional acquiescence can be treated as a “gloss on ‘Executive Power’ vested in the President by §1 of Art. II.” This argument is of a different nature than the one rejected above. Rather than relying on the United States’ treaty obligations, the President relies on an independent source of authority in ordering Texas to put aside its procedural bar to successive habeas petitions. Nevertheless, we find that our claims-settlement cases do not support the authority that the President asserts in this case.

The claims-settlement cases involve a narrow set of circumstances: the making of executive agreements to settle civil claims between American citizens and foreign governments or foreign nationals. They are based on the view that “a systematic, unbroken, executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of the Congress and never before questioned,” can “raise a presumption that the [action] had been [taken] in pursuance of its consent.” . . .

Even still, the limitations on this source of executive power are clearly set forth and the Court has been careful to note that “[p]ast practice does not, by itself, create power.”

The President’s Memorandum is not supported by a “particularly longstanding practice” of congressional acquiescence, but rather is what the United States itself has described as “unprecedented action.” Indeed, the Government has not identified a single instance in which the President has attempted (or Congress has acquiesced in) a Presidential directive issued to state courts, much less one that reaches deep into the heart of the State’s police powers and compels state courts to reopen final criminal judgments and set aside neutrally applicable state laws. The Executive’s narrow and strictly limited authority to settle international claims disputes pursuant to an executive agreement cannot stretch so far as to support the current Presidential Memorandum.

Medellin argues that the President’s Memorandum is a valid exercise of his “Take Care” power. The United States, however, does not rely upon the President’s responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” We think this a wise concession. This authority allows the President to execute the laws, not make them. For the reasons we have stated, theAvena judgment is not domestic law; accordingly, the President cannot rely on his Take Care powers here.

The judgment of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is affirmed.

It is so ordered.

JUSTICE STEVENS, CONCURRING IN THE JUDGMENT.

There is a great deal of wisdom in Justice Breyer’s dissent. I agree that the text and history of the Supremacy Clause, as well as this Court’s treaty-related cases, do not support a presumption against self-execution. . . . I think this case presents a closer question than the Court’s opinion allows. In the end, however, I am persuaded that the relevant treaties do not authorize this Court to enforce the judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Case Concerning Avena and Other Mexican Nationals.

JUSTICE BREYER, WITH WHOM JUSTICE SOUTER AND JUSTICE GINSBURG JOIN, DISSENTING.

The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause provides that “all Treaties . . . 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.” The Clause means that the “courts” must regard “a treaty . . . as equivalent to an act of the legislature, whenever it operates of itself without the aid of any legislative provision.” . . .

. . . [T]he United States has agreed to submit, in this kind of case, to the ICJ’s “compulsory jurisdiction” for purposes of “compulsory settlement.” And it agreed that the ICJ’s judgments would have “binding force . . . between the parties and in respect of [a] particular case.” President Bush has determined that domestic courts should enforce this particular ICJ judgment. And Congress has done nothing to suggest the contrary. . . . I believe the treaty obligations . . . bind the courts no less than would “an act of the [federal] legislature.” . . .

. . . I would find the relevant treaty provisions self-executing as applied to the ICJ judgment before us (giving that judgment domestic legal effect) for the following reasons, taken together.

First, the language of the relevant treaties strongly supports direct judicial enforceability, at least of judgments of the kind at issue here. The Optional Protocol bears the title “Compulsory Settlement of Disputes,” thereby emphasizing the mandatory and binding nature of the procedures it sets forth. . . . [T]he Optional Protocol’s basic objective is not just to provide a forum for settlement but to provide a forum for compulsory settlement.

Second, the Optional Protocol here applies to a dispute about the meaning of a Vienna Convention provision that is itself self-executing and judicially enforceable. The Convention provision is about an individual’s “rights,” namely, his right upon being arrested to be informed of his separate right to contact his nation’s consul. The provision language is precise. . . .

Third, logic suggests that a treaty provision providing for “final” and “binding” judgments that “settl[e]” treaty-based disputes is self-executing insofar as the judgment in question concerns the meaning of an underlying treaty provision that is itself self-executing. . . .

Why treat differently the parties’ agreement to binding ICJ determination about, e.g., the proper interpretation of the Vienna Convention clauses containing the rights here at issue? Why not simply read the relevant Vienna Convention provisions as if (between the parties and in respect to the 51 individuals at issue) they contain words that encapsulate the ICJ’s decision? Why would the ICJ judgment not bind in precisely the same way those words would bind if they appeared in the relevant Vienna Convention provisions--just as the ICJ says, for purposes of this case, that they do? . . .

Fourth, the majority’s very different approach has seriously negative practical implications. The United States has entered into at least 70 treaties that contain provisions for ICJ dispute settlement similar to the Protocol before us. . . . If the Optional Protocol here, taken together with the U.N. Charter and its annexed ICJ Statute, is insufficient to warrant enforcement of the ICJ judgment before us, it is difficult to see how one could reach a different conclusion in any of these other instances. And the consequence is to undermine longstanding efforts in those treaties to create an effective international system for interpreting and applying many, often commercial, self-executing treaty provisions. . . .

Fifth, other factors, related to the particular judgment here at issue, make that judgment well suited to direct judicial enforcement. The specific issue before the ICJ concerned “ ‘review and reconsideration’ ” of the “possible prejudice” caused in each of the 51 affected cases by an arresting State’s failure to provide the defendant with rights guaranteed by the Vienna Convention. This review will call for an understanding of how criminal procedure works, including whether, and how, a notification failure may work prejudice. As the ICJ itself recognized, “it is the judicial process that is suited to this task.” Courts frequently work with criminal procedure and related prejudice. Legislatures do not. . . .

Sixth, to find the United States’ treaty obligations self-executing as applied to the ICJ judgment (and consequently to find that judgment enforceable) does not threaten constitutional conflict with other branches; it does not require us to engage in nonjudicial activity; and it does not require us to create a new cause of action. The only question before us concerns the application of the ICJ judgment as binding law applicable to the parties in a particular criminal proceeding that Texas law creates independently of the treaty. . . .

Seventh, neither the President nor Congress has expressed concern about direct judicial enforcement of the ICJ decision. . . .

Were the Court for a moment to shift the direction of its legal gaze, looking instead to the Supremacy Clause and to the extensive case law interpreting that Clause as applied to treaties, I believe it would reach a better supported, more felicitous conclusion. That approach, well embedded in Court case law, leads to the conclusion that the ICJ judgment before us is judicially enforceable without further legislative action. . . .

For the reasons set forth, I respectfully dissent.