from: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0413deathrow.html

Mexico fights death row case
Treaty violation at the heart of issue in Ohio

Richard A. Serrano
Los Angeles Times
Apr. 13, 2003 12:00 AM

A family of four was shot in the head, and Detective Roger Knabel escorted Jose Loza to downtown Middletown, Ohio, in handcuffs. In a small interrogation room, Knabel granted Loza a phone call, advised him of his right to a lawyer and asked him to sign a written statement.

Could Loza read and write English? Knabel asked.

Yes.

Where was he from?

Guadalajara, Mexico.

A naturalized citizen?

A resident, Loza said, and he gave his alien registration number.

The young man was charged with four counts of capital murder. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

Failure to tell suspect

And it is precisely what the detective failed to mention 12 years ago that may get Loza off death row. He never told him, as police are supposed to but seldom do, that Loza, a Mexican immigrant who grew up in Los Angeles, also had a right to meet with someone from the Mexican Consulate.

There are 51 Mexican nationals on death rows in the United States. Most are in California and Texas. Loza is the only one in Ohio.

His case underlines a widening rift between the United States, where many are angry over a high rate of crime and determined to harshly punish the worst offenders, and Mexico, where there is no capital punishment and the government is demanding that the United States commute the sentences of all 51 men to life in prison.

The disagreement comes at a time of festering relations between the two neighbors.

Angst about the death penalty raises significant questions that the two nations may never fully answer.

For instance, how far can Mexico go to protect its people in the United States, where the ultimate punishment is handed out so frequently?

And is the United States practicing implicit racism by ignoring the treaty provisions in its rush to extract confessions from Mexicans?

On this point, Juan Manuel Gomez-Robledo, legal adviser for the Mexican Foreign Ministry, said, "I would not say officially it's racism. But there is a consistent pattern of discrimination from juries, from courts and from prosecutors who are generally biased against Hispanics.

"And that, of course, makes them (Mexicans) all the more vulnerable than they already are as foreigners."

In Mexico, this is viewed as no small border dispute.

President Vicente Fox canceled a trip to visit President Bush at his Texas ranch last summer because he was outraged over the execution of Javier Suarez Medina. Fox had lobbied Bush and Texas Gov. Rick Perry for leniency for the man, who was put to death in August for the 1988 murder of an undercover U.S. drug agent.

'We are going to win'

"We are struggling against the death penalty for our countrymen in the United States," Fox recently told reporters in Mexico. "We are fighting a battle, and we are going to win, step by step, to prevent our nationals from being executed and, above all, from having their legal and human rights violated."

So determined is the Mexican government that it has turned to the U.N. International Court of Justice and won an order that the United States not take the lives of the three Mexicans closest to receiving a date of execution.

"Respect for life is too important," Gomez-Robledo said in a recent interview.

"We consider it an inhumane penalty, and there is more and more evidence that people are often sent to death when they are either not guilty or there has been strong mitigating evidence that was perhaps overlooked by the jury or the court. And this is the only penalty that, once it is imposed, there is no way to remedy anything."

His counterpart in Washington, William H. Taft IV, legal adviser to the State Department, recently conceded that police often fail to protect the right of foreign nationals to meet with their consular officials.

He also said police must do more to comply with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which requires immediate notification.

"These are difficult cases, and we are in a difficult position," Taft told a gathering of the National Association of Attorneys General. "The United States has not done as well as it should in complying with these obligations, which we insist upon so strenuously for our own nationals.

"We need to keep doing better."

The Loza case demonstrates the point.

When Knabel entered the crime scene, a private residence in Middletown, he videotaped the rooms where Loza shot his girlfriend's family while they slept. Muttering under his breath and recorded on the audio portion of the tape, the White detective said the grisly scene "looked like a place a wetback from California would hide."

"I'm 60 years old," Knabel said in an interview. "I will never deny not using racial slurs. I'm not proud of it. When I grew up, everybody around me said those things."

In California, where 28 of the 51 Mexicans on death row in the United States are awaiting execution, a law passed in 1999 mandates that police give foreign nationals the opportunity to meet with their consular officials. But most states have no such laws.

In contrast to the United States, Gomez-Robledo said, Mexico has a vigorous program to make sure foreigners arrested there are allowed to meet with representatives from their consulates. "We are in touch permanently with Mexican law enforcement officials to make them conscious of their obligations," he said.

Effect on confession

Laurence Komp, who is defending Loza in Ohio, cited Knabel's failure to tell Loza of his consular rights as a pivotal reason that his client so freely confessed to the four murders.

"Absolutely it could have been helpful," Komp said. "Jose was 18 years old at the time. Even an American 18-year-old kid stopped by the police for anything gets nervous. And imagine you're not from this country."

Loza crossed the border illegally with his mother when he was 10, and they settled in Los Angeles. Poor and with little schooling, he drifted into a life of gangs and soon met a teenager named Dorothy Jackson. They fell in love, and when she and her family moved to Ohio, he followed them.

In Middletown, Jackson became pregnant with Loza's baby. He wanted to marry her and take her back to Los Angeles. But her mother forbade it. Loza told Knabel that she threatened to turn him in to police for his gang activities.

So one night in January 1991, he told the detective, he went to the family's home and shot and killed the mother, her son and two other daughters.

"I done it, and I'm taking the whole responsibility for it," Loza said after his arrest.

Knabel, now retired, said he had never heard of consular notification. "That issue was never, ever brought up by anyone. It was never mentioned anywhere."

Loza, now 30, declined a death row interview. But in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, he wrote, "I was not notified by the police that I had the right to have Mexican counsel present during the interrogation or that I could receive legal advice from them."