Opinion ID: 2625741
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Absent Justification, the Current Petition Is Procedurally Barred

Text: Before we address the status of petitioner's current petition, we feel compelled to point out that this is not a case where petitioner's notification claim has not been considered by this court on its merits. As already noted, petitioner's first habeas corpus petition asserted a violation of his Vienna Convention rights by police and the trial court. We reviewed and considered that claim, including, of course, whether petitioner was prejudiced by any violation of his article 36 rights. Thus, consistent with our own prior decisions, as well as that of the United States Supreme Court, we assumed for purposes of review that petitioner had individually enforceable rights under article 36. ( People v. Cook (2006) 39 Cal.4th 566, 600 [47 Cal.Rptr.3d 22, 139 P.3d 492]; Breard v. Greene (1998) 523 U.S. 371, 376-378 [140 L.Ed.2d 529, 118 S.Ct. 1352].) [3] Specifically, we reviewed the declarations of the Mexican Consul General and the two witnesses whose presence the Mexican consulate would have obtained during his trial, Leonardo Armenta and Maximino Aviles, to determine whether petitioner was prejudiced either because he was denied the assistance the Mexican government could have provided him or denied the presence of these witnesses at his trial. In so doing, we effectively complied with the ICJ's directive, discussed in greater detail below, that the cases of the 51 Mexican nationals at issue in Avena be reviewed and reconsidered in light of the asserted violation of their article 36 right to consular notification to determine whether, as a result of that violation, those individuals suffered actual prejudice. ( Avena, supra, 2004 I.C.J. at p. 60, par. 121.) We denied the petition on its merits. Thus, this court has already considered petitioner's article 36 claim without reference to any procedural bar. As petitioner's counsel conceded at argument, the current petition presents no new evidentiary showing that he suffered actual prejudice as a result of the asserted violation of his article 36 rights. Indeed, his current petition withdraws the declaration of Armenta that was part of his first petition, so there is even less of a factual showing in support of his claim of prejudice. Rather, petitioner maintains that the Avena decision and the Presidential Memorandum constituted a change in the law, unavailable to him at the time he filed his first petition, that now requires us to review and reconsider his conviction and sentence, notwithstanding any state procedural bar. In other words, unlike every other habeas corpus petitioner, even those advancing substantial constitutional claims, petitioner maintains that he is entitled to a second round of review of a claim we have already reviewed and rejected on its merits even though the claim is based on essentially the same factual showing previously advanced because, according to petitioner's reading of Avena and the Presidential Memorandum, procedural defaults cannot be applied to the cases of the 51 Mexican nationals named in Avena. (5) We would be dubious about this reading of Avena even in the absence of the Supreme Court's decision in Medellin, supra, 552 U.S. ___ [128 S.Ct. 1346]. In any event, Medellin has eviscerated petitioner's claim. The effect of Medellin is to restore the status quo ante that existed before Avena and the Presidential Memorandum, under which a state may reject a habeas corpus petition raising a Vienna Convention claim as procedurally barred.