Patterico at Oh, That Liberal Media has written a post called The L.A. Times and the Golden Rule.

He's talking about the consular notification death penalty cases I talked about the other day.

The LA Times has an editorial [The Law and the Golden Rule, June 6, 2005] where they suggest that if the states don't roll over for the International Courts, over the consular notification question, then Americans overseas won't be able to contact the US Consulate if they're arrested, but of course that's not the problem.

No one has suggested that the various criminal aliens weren't allowed to contact their consulates, they are just saying the police didn't suggest it.

But as Patterico points out, the police not only don't know if a murder suspect is an alien or not, in large parts of the country, they aren't allowed to ask. It's the sanctuary policy, that local politicians use to protect illegal aliens from deportation, that causes them not to ask, that and the fact that America is now filling up with native-born communities of people who can't speak English very well.

The consular notification question is an internationalization of the Miranda warnings, in which special aid is to be given to alien criminals.

Thomas Sowell wrote of the Miranda case in his book, The Vision of the Anointed,

Attorney General Ramsey Clark, for example, said that "elemental fairness" required that those arrested for crimes be advised of their right to remain silent because experienced criminals, gang members and Mafiosi already knew that. … The Supreme Court in its landmark Miranda decision likewise argued that to fail to give everyone the same information already to possessed by the more sophisticated would be to "take advantage of the poor, the ignorant, and the distracted." Note what this taking advantage consists of: a failure to provide a greater means of escaping punishment for crimes committed by criminals who fall below state of the art in criminal evasions of the law.

The idea that Mexican criminals are entitled to the aid of a network of Consuls, who are, in effect, engaged in a massive conspiracy to evade the immigration laws, probably goes beyond anything the Warren Court would have thought of.