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UK High Court 'Perma-Bans' Efforts to Extradite Lauri Love to the US (arstechnica.com)
The U.K.'s High Court will not send Lauri Love to face trial in the U.S. for hacking government computer systems. Instead they've issued a final refusal to overturn Love's successful appeal of his extradition, Ars Technica reports, "effectively ending the extradition effort permanently."
Love was originally arrested in the UK in October of 2013 after using an automated scanner to locate servers within a large range of IP addresses for SQL injection and ColdFusion vulnerabilities and then breaching vulnerable systems and installing Web shells to give him remote administrative-level access. He allegedly managed to compromise servers belonging to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Army, the Federal Reserve, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Love's attorneys fought the extradition on the grounds that Love -- who has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, severe depression, and antibiotic-resistant eczema -- would not get appropriate medical attention in a U.S. prison and would be at risk of suicide if he faced the potential 99-year prison term associated with the charges...
The U.S. had already essentially dropped efforts to extradite Love, but the ruling by the High Court now sets legal precedent that may bar future extraditions of British citizens on hacking charges. In a statement e-mailed to Ars, Naomi Colvin -- acting director of the Courage Foundation, an organization that has assisted Love in his extradition appeal -- said that as a result of the ruling, "there is now very little prospect of any British hacker ever finding themselves in the same position as Lauri Love or Gary McKinnon. Fifteen years of terrible public policy in which British hackers were left open to the vindictive instincts of US prosecutors have now been brought to an end."
Lauri Love told the site that with this ruling, "The era of the U.S. Department of Justice as world police is over."
The U.S. had already essentially dropped efforts to extradite Love, but the ruling by the High Court now sets legal precedent that may bar future extraditions of British citizens on hacking charges. In a statement e-mailed to Ars, Naomi Colvin -- acting director of the Courage Foundation, an organization that has assisted Love in his extradition appeal -- said that as a result of the ruling, "there is now very little prospect of any British hacker ever finding themselves in the same position as Lauri Love or Gary McKinnon. Fifteen years of terrible public policy in which British hackers were left open to the vindictive instincts of US prosecutors have now been brought to an end."
Lauri Love told the site that with this ruling, "The era of the U.S. Department of Justice as world police is over."
1) It doesn't matter "where" he did the crime. Extradition treaties usually only require that the act be criminal in both countries. I would suggest it matters more where the prosecutors have bothered to build a case against him. The court's ruling suggests that no British prosecutor has bothered to do it, and so a fair trial could only be performed in the US, where there is interest in seeing justice done.
Your strawman about jurisdictions that his packets passed through is ridiculous. The US would like to try him because many of his ultimate victims were US entities, including branches of the US government. The prosecution not merely premised on his packets having passed through the US.
2) How often has the US refused an extradition request by the UK? You're really suggesting that the US is at fault because Britain hardly ever asks for extradition -- possibly because the US is much more effective at punishing criminals who have victimized citizens of the UK.
UK will likely be freezing some Russians' assets and denying entry to others. Seeing as wealthy Russians love to invest in the UK, this will hit them in the most painful spot: the pockets.
Maybe, maybe not. The UK still has the concepts of "parole" and "suspended sentences" -- the broken American Federal prison system did away with those in the 1980s. The US "justice" system is too harsh for anyone other than a violent, hardened criminal to deserve it.
Considering that the UK jails 1/5 of the people that the US does (per capita), I'd say the UK is doing fine. Meanwhile, the US wastes a lot of tax money and lives being the greatest incarcerator in the world. Kudos to the UK courts for not throwing another person into the pit of the US injustice system.
" Extradition treaties usually only require that the act be criminal in both countries. " not 100% true it may also require that the punishment be in the same order of magnitude or exclude specific punishment , e.g. see article 7 of extradiction treaty French-US where the death penalty must be excluded as possible punishment. . What do you know about the UK treaty ? If tehre is something similar and the announced prosecution goal is e.g. 99 years in the US or something in the order of magnitudes a few year in UK is not the same type of punishment. That is why even if there is a treaty between the US and many countries , you gotta look in the detail before stating they have no reason to not extradite.
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The problem is, other nations are starting to realize that our court system has turned into some sort of Kafkaesque parody of justice. We have a Stalin-sized Gulag, famed for its state-sponsored regime of anal rape. Almost everyone in the Gulag was coerced into a false confession in a process euphemistically called "plea bargaining". No self-respecting nation would surrender their citizen to be ground up by that sort of infernal meat grinder.
Shame on our judicial oligarchy. They are making us look like some sort of North Korean dystopia.
No, it's quite common for US cops (generally hired from the dregs of society) to do things like that and worse. Start reading about civil forfeiture abuse, where travelers and business owners are relieved of valuables and cash under "suspicion" without trial. Obama and Holder tried to curtail this, Trump and Sessions fully support it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
But the GP is talking about actual terrorists, people who were directly involved in killing others, and yes, he's right, they weren't extradited.
I, also, was referring to IRA members who where actual terrorists. The fact that they killed people does not mean that their crime was not political.
No, there's no precedent in UK case law that says it's not murder if you did it for political reasons
Of course not. There is UK case law that says you can't be extradited if you committed murder under certain circumstances for political reasons. The political incidence test as used by the US and UK was defined in In Re Castioni, where the court found:
that the offence which the prisoner had committed was incidental to and formed a part of political disturbances, and therefore was an offence of a political character within the meaning of the statute, and the prisoner could not be surrendered, but was entitled to be discharged from custody
The accused in the case had, in fact, been charged with murder. There was little doubt that he was guilty. Yet the English court found that he could not be extradited as his crime was political in nature.
The US applied the same standard to IRA terrorists, which led to the interesting conclusion in Quinn v Robinson that an IRA member who committed murder in England could be extradited, but if he had committed the same act in Northern Ireland he would not be extraditable.
The US and UK later negotiated some revisions to the extradition laws, which have placed tighter limits on what constitutes political crimes. However, during the timespan we are discussing, refusing to extradite some IRA terrorists was consistent with both US and UK extradition laws.
Bullshit...
US Requests
41 requests to extradite UK Citizens from the UK, of which 28 were agreed.
21 requests to extradite USA Citizens from the UK, of which 12 were agreed.
UK Requests
25 requests to extradite UK Citizens from the USA, of which 20 were agreed.
8 requests to extradite USA Citizens from the USA, of which 5 were agreed.
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