Double Standard

Nuts and Boalts notes that the US is pulling out of the enforcement part of the Vienna Consular Treaty. Basically, that's the one that guarantees foreign nationals arrested for crimes in the US are granted the right to contact and consult their embassies in the US. The move was prompted by ongoing developments in the Medellin v. Dretke case, where the ICJ held that the US violated the treaty by, well, not granting Medellin access to his embassy before sentencing him to death (see this post in specific and the SCOTUS Blog in general to play catch up, if need be).

N+B makes the rather cliched argument "imagine if an American couple in China were tried and executed without the knowledge of the US embassy...why that'd be outrageous, violation of human rights, blah blah blah self-righteous bull shit." The normal response to that analysis (which is made in response to any number of situations) is that the US is qualitatively different from the country in question. For example, one arguing that the Iraq war was unjustified because "imagine if Syria invaded Israel in response to 'WMD's' and 'violations of international law,' we'd be aghast!" doesn't hold up because the situations are not even comparable. The US is trying to depose a brutal dictator and bring democracy to an oppressed people. Syria would be trying to overthrow an established democracy and, if past acts hold true, would engage in the mass slaughter of innocents. That alone makes the analogy invalid.

However, in this case, the argument actually holds water. Why? Because our Death Penalty system is so broken and dysfunctional that one cannot claim that America is "special" in righteousness. The US death penalty process is plagued by race and class biased, ridiculously disparate based on geography, and otherwise "wantonly and freakishly imposed." There are innumerable examples of absolutely abysmal processes that have been ignored or endorsed in the process of slamming criminals to execution. Simply put, whereas nobody can really be "outraged" that the US is trying to bring democracy to Iraq, people have a very real right to be outrageous that their citizens run the risk of being subjected to the roulette wheel that has become the American Criminal Justice system. And the very fact that this is true should give us all pause as a nation.