The Nevada Supreme Court has overturned the death sentence imposed on Mexican foreign national Carlos Gutierrez.
In a 4-3 ruling, the court held that Nevada had violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations when police and prosecutors failed to notify Gutierrez of his rights to consular assistance by his government.
The court further held, based upon extensive mitigating evidence presented with the assistance of the Mexican government in his post-conviction proceedings, that the denial of consular assistance had been prejudicial.
Justices Ron Parraguirre, James Hardesty, and Lidia Stiglich dissented.
Justice Parraguirre wrote that the 2004 opinion of the International Court of Justice in Avena and Other Mexican Nationals v. United States of America finding violations of the right to consular notification in more than fifty death-penalty cases involving Mexican nationals “is not binding on this court and says nothing about this state’s statutory procedural bars.”
The dissenters further said the treaty claim did not involve a newly discovered right and should have been raised by Gutierrez’s lawyers before the Avena decision.
Finally, they asserted, Nevada law limits relief in second or successive post-conviction claims to violations of constitutional rights.
The Vienna Convention claim, they wrote, involves a treaty violation, not a constitutional violation.
Source: Death Penalty Information Center, Staff, December 9, 2020
🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us:
deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.
Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
