A Federal judge in Manhattan refused on Tuesday to dismiss charges against a defendant whose lawyer had argued that his client’s extradition from a Far East country was a result of improper political pressure brought to bear on the little country by the United States.
But the law is clear: unless a U.S. government agent points a gun at a small child threatening to kill him should his father not agree to extradition, or some act as reprehensible as that, the United States does not care how a defendant is brought to it. Agents can kidnap a defendant for all it cares. The country might be upset, but the defendant himself has no standing to complain. Extradition is an agreement between two countries not individuals. If a defendant has a problem with the way he was extradited he needs to take it up with the country that extradited him.
The defendant will have to go to trial, and there it will only be about the evidence. Whether or not the extradition was illegal or even reprehensible is not going to matter to a jury. Jurors are “little picture” people. They are focused on evidence. The “big picture” is left to scholars.
David Zapp