Bush Tries to Halt Execution of Convicted Killer in Texas

President George Bush, who signed the death warrant for 152 prisoners as governor of Texas, this week faces a rare challenge from his home state against his efforts to block the execution of a convicted killer from Mexico.

The case of Jose Ernesto Medellin, to go before the supreme court on Wednesday, examines whether the president has the power to set aside a state law that conflicts with an international treaty.

It puts Mr Bush in the unusual position of arguing against the death penalty and against the very same Texans who helped put him in the White House. Even more unusually, it puts Mr Bush on the same side of the dispute as the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

But the confrontation is more likely to turn on the dividing line between state and presidential powers than on the legitimacy of the death penalty. The supreme court is to deal more directly with the death penalty next January when it hears arguments against the use of lethal injection, the main method of execution in the US.

Wednesday's case began with a death row appeal from Medellin, a gang member from Houston who was just 18 when he raped and strangled to death two teenage girls in 1993. After a decade on death row, in 2004 the Mexican government obtained a ruling from the International Court of Justice on Mr Medellin's behalf that state police had violated his right to access to consular officials from Mexico. Mr Medellin, who was born in Mexico, has lived in the US since he was nine years old, although he was never a legal resident.

The judgment found that the Texas authorities failed to tell Mr Medellin and 50 other death row inmates from Mexico of their rights under the Vienna Convention to seek advice from the Mexican consulate, or to inform consular officials about their cases.

Mr Bush issued a memorandum two months later that the US courts would implement the ICJ ruling. The Bush administration is expected to argue that the president's executive power over treaty provisions outranks state laws.

Although the administration notes that it does not agree with the ICJ's interpretation of the Vienna Convention, it says it will abide by the court's decision for the sake of protecting US interests abroad.

However, Texas argues that Mr Bush's memo on the death penalty case would set a dangerous precedent for presidential power. The state argues that Mr Bush's action disregards earlier verdicts by an appeals court and the supreme court that Mr Medellin was not entitled to invoke his rights as a Mexican citizen because he had not raised the issue at his original trial.

In a speech to a conservative legal group in Washington, Ted Cruz, the state's solicitor general and a key adviser on Mr Bush's 2000 election campaign, accused the president of overstepping his authority. "This president's exercise of this power is egregiously beyond the bounds of presidential authority," he said.