A Deadly Serious Border Dispute

A family of four was shot in the head, and Det. Roger Knabel brought Jose Loza downtown 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.

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 the U.S. commute the sentences of all 51 men to life in prison.

The disagreement comes at a time of festering relations between the two neighbors. In its war on Iraq, the U.S. could not count on Mexico to join the coalition to remove President Saddam Hussein. Other contentious issues include drug smuggling and illegal border crossings.

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 U.S. practicing implicit racism by ignoring the treaty provisions in its rush to extract confessions from Mexicans?

On this point, Juan Manuel Gomez-Robledo, legal advisor 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 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.’s International Court of Justice and won an order that the U.S. 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 advisor 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 Assn. 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 Det. 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.”

Indeed, William Sulfsted, police chief in nearby Lynchburg, testified in the Loza case that the arrest came in a southern Ohio community steeped in racial divisiveness. He was asked in court if he considered “wetback” to be “racially derogatory.”

“Well, probably,” Sulfsted testified, adding that he grew up in a community where minorities of all kinds were often disparaged.

That highlights a key point Mexicans are trying to make: that their big neighbor to the north often arrogantly -- and “ignorantly,” as Gomez-Robledo put it -- defies its obligations under the treaty.

Yet at the same time, they note, U.S. diplomats cry foul when Americans are seized abroad and not afforded instant consular access. They mention the Iran hostage crisis of the late 1970s and the forced landing of a U.S. spy plane in China in 2001.

Mexico is not the first country to turn to the World Court for help in persuading the U.S. to live up to the treaty. Paraguay brought a case involving one of its nationals, Angel Breard, who was sentenced to death in Virginia. Once Breard was executed in 1998, Paraguay withdrew its complaint and the court never decided the issue.

Germany complained about a case of two of its citizens, Karl and Walter LaGrand, who were executed in Arizona in 1999. That case was not withdrawn, and the World Court ruled emphatically in June 2001 that the U.S. had a “legal obligation” to grant consular access to foreigners.

In February, acting on the current complaint from Mexico, the court ordered the U.S. to postpone the executions of two Mexicans in Texas and a third in Oklahoma -- the three furthest along in the legal process -- until the court could consider the issue further.

The ruling is complicated for Washington. Many legal experts said the federal government could not force the states to postpone the executions.

In California -- where 28 of the 51 Mexicans on death row in the U.S. 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 U.S., 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.

Sandra Babcock, a Minneapolis lawyer who runs the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program to assist Mexican nationals, said immigrants are frequently confused and scared in this country, unable to understand the often intimidating U.S. judicial apparatus. An advocate from the Mexican Embassy, she said, can help them learn their rights and navigate through the courts.

“There’s always been a sense in Mexico that Mexicans are treated unfairly in our judicial system,” she said.

Laurence Komp, who is defending Loza in Ohio, cited Det. 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, Dorothy 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 into 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 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.

“As to the journey that brought me to Los Angeles from Guadalajara, that’s a very long story, but similar to that of countless Mexicans looking for a better life.”