*Drumroll* Amanda Knox verdict coming up!

[CountDeMoney]

INTERPOL is a fucking mailing list.

[Ed Anger]

INTERPOL is a fucking mailing list.

And a band.

[Sheilbh]

The fact that they have a different system doesn't mean that a US court wouldn't look on it as double jeopardy.

Yes it does. Unless US courts are odd they'll look at the substance of what the Italian courts are doing.

A similar example is the Assange case. There (from memory) the issue was that we could only extradite someone for arrest or prosecution and the Swedes wanted Assange for an interview - which in England is just assisting the police. In Sweden the prosecuting magistrate has to interview the accused, even if they've enough to charge them, before they can formally arrest them. It's a formal difference but on the substance it's not like an interview in the English system but a necessary formality for an arrest.

The High Court said (and the Supreme Court agreed) that there was no easy analogy with the English system, but on the substance Assange was wanted to start criminal proceedings not to assist with enquiries.

I imagine in a case with Italy the US court would consider the finalisation of the verdict and the fact that Italy has automatic appeals etc. What they'll want to see is if it's actually double jeopardy, or just looks like it in terms of form.

I'm not sure it would even go on interpol.  Doesn't Spain indict people from other countries for things like war crimes?

I think they've done that a couple of times, because there were Spanish victims. Belgium used to claim universal jurisdiction and has a war crimes law, to the best of my knowledge no-one's ever successfully charged

Now they just claim jurisdiction if the accused or the victim is Belgian or a Belgian resident.

[DontSayBanana]

Like I said, the argument could be made, since the prosecution would be illegal under US law; it's not a straight "this is against the text of this treaty."

Also Sheilbh, it's difficult to compare a UK extradition case, since the UK explicitly recognizes double jeopardy within the requesting party as grounds to refuse an extradition.  There've been a couple more cases solidifying that practice in the meantime:

http://www.jfhlaw.co.uk/news/extradition-success-in-double-jeopardy-case/

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4206584/Brit-Graham-Mitchells-horror-over-double-jeopardy-extradition-battle.html

[Sheilbh]

That's not the argument I made though.

[Neil]

We will.  There's no way we'd extradite for a clear case of double jeopardy.

And that's why the whole Polanski thing was just.

[Razgovory]

INTERPOL is a fucking mailing list.

Didn't they used to be part of the Gestapo?

[dps]

The fact that they have a different system doesn't mean that a US court wouldn't look on it as double jeopardy.

Yes it does. Unless US courts are odd they'll look at the substance of what the Italian courts are doing.

A similar example is the Assange case. There (from memory) the issue was that we could only extradite someone for arrest or prosecution and the Swedes wanted Assange for an interview - which in England is just assisting the police. In Sweden the prosecuting magistrate has to interview the accused, even if they've enough to charge them, before they can formally arrest them. It's a formal difference but on the substance it's not like an interview in the English system but a necessary formality for an arrest.

The High Court said (and the Supreme Court agreed) that there was no easy analogy with the English system, but on the substance Assange was wanted to start criminal proceedings not to assist with enquiries.

I imagine in a case with Italy the US court would consider the finalisation of the verdict and the fact that Italy has automatic appeals etc. What they'll want to see is if it's actually double jeopardy, or just looks like it in terms of form.

I don't think that we are fundamentally in disagreement here.  I didn't say that the US courst will definately look at it as a violation of due process.  Obviously we don't insist that proceeding in foreign courts follow the exact rules as proceeding in US courts before we agree to extradite someone;  if we did, essentially no one would ever be extradited.  The issue is whether the US courts will look at it as merely a matter of Italian courts having a different procedure, or whether the Italian procedure is a violation of double jeopardy.  While I think it's likely that it would be looked on as double jeopardy, I don't think it's a given that it would be so regarded.

[DontSayBanana]

And that's why the whole Polanski thing was just.

No, the whole Polanski thing stunk to high heaven.  He bolted before his sentencing hearing, so he never actually served any time for his conviction.  The US extradition treaties usually do provide for extradition to serve the remainder of a sentence (which, in his case, would have been the whole thing).  The Euros didn't like that or the fact that we were going to add criminal evasion into the mix.

And Sheilbh, what I was saying was that it was pointless to use the Assange extradition case as an example, since the UK has extra codified protections that wouldn't be available to Amanda Knox here in the US.

[Eddie Teach]

And that's why the whole Polanski thing was just.

No, the whole Polanski thing stunk to high heaven.  He bolted before his sentencing hearing, so he never actually served any time for his conviction.  The US extradition treaties usually do provide for extradition to serve the remainder of a sentence (which, in his case, would have been the whole thing).  The Euros didn't like that or the fact that we were going to add criminal evasion into the mix.

Neil is trolling.

[DontSayBanana]

Neil is trolling.

I'm sorry for feeding the troll.

[The Larch]

I'm not sure it would even go on interpol.  Doesn't Spain indict people from other countries for things like war crimes?

I think they've done that a couple of times, because there were Spanish victims. Belgium used to claim universal jurisdiction and has a war crimes law, to the best of my knowledge no-one's ever successfully charged

Now they just claim jurisdiction if the accused or the victim is Belgian or a Belgian resident.

It's not done anymore, though, as since they booted Garzón out of the judiciary nobody wants to embark in such cases anymore. And our courts already have more than enough to do with domestic corruption before launching campaigns for universal justice.

Funnily enough, now cases are being opened in Argentina against Francoist stooges. 


Regarding Italy's messed up judicial system, IIRC some of the automatic appeals and huge delays were a result of Berlusconi's reforms, which aimed at delaying verdicts as long as possible in order to allow him to avoid his own processes.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Yes, foreign courts do not have to comply entirely with U.S. criminal law and U.S. bill of rights. If they did, no country on Earth would be a valid country to extradite people to and we'd have no extradition treaties. Generally the order of precedence in U.S. law is Constitution > Treaties > Statute. That means a treaty can't overrule the constitution, but it specific stuff like double jeopardy is only vaguely defined in the constitution. So the courts here can look at a situation and determine if the situation in the foreign country is similar to double jeopardy here, they do not have to get hung up on the technicalities. The courts can look at it and make judgments.

So for example they could very easily say, "In the Italian system the equivalent of an actual verdict had yet to be reached since their system requires multiple levels of conviction before the verdict is finalized. In our system what is happening here might be more equivalent to either a mistrial or an appellate court throwing out a lower court trial and allowing for a retrial, so it isn't at fundamental odds with rights guaranteed under the Constitution."

I wouldn't be surprised if that is what they'd say, because it's basically true. Here in the United States you can have an appellate court throw out a trial court's result, and then the prosecution can decide whether it wants to retry the case or not. Rarely, in cases of "genuine innocence" you might have an appellate court actually declare someone innocent of the crime they committed, in which case I don't believe the prosecution is allowed to bring a new case. But when an appellate court finds such a defect with the lower court trial as to essentially dismiss it, they can allow for a new trial and sometimes that happens.

There was a recent death penalty case in Texas that hinged in part around stuff like that. Something like 5-6 black defendants over the years had been sentenced to death where the State brought in a psychologist during the sentencing hearing who claimed that blacks are inherently more dangerous than whites and are not safe in society. The juries sentenced all 5-6 to death. In every one of those cases other than one, the higher court ruled that testimony like that was so injurious to the rights of the defendants that they were entitled to an entirely new sentencing hearing. But it didn't overturn their convictions or overturn their sentence, it just said "you have to have a new sentencing hearing." All of them were later resentenced to death. (The one who wasn't even given a new sentencing hearing is the one that made news because of how it negatively reflected on the application of the death penalty.)

But anyway, you can overrule lower courts here without disallowing a retrial. In the Italian system they used different legalese and "acquitted" Knox at the appellate level, but it's not really the same thing as an "acquittal" here. An acquittal is a final determination at the end of a trial, the Italian result is more like a ruling within the larger context of the whole trial process, which is multilayered in Italy.

But U.S. courts also are allowed to dig into the evidence to some degree. If they were to determine sever evidentiary problems on Italy's part, they might not extradite. I think there are more legal concerns at play here than just double jeopardy, which probably wouldn't apply.