Opinion ID: 4391884
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Appellant’s Challenges

Text: In most domestic habeas corpus cases, we review the factual ﬁndings of the district court for clear error and its legal determinations de novo. Carter v. Thompson, 690 F.3d 837, 843 (7th Cir. 2012). In habeas corpus cases challenging extradition decisions, however, appellate review of the district court is de novo. Both we and the district court review the magistrate judge’s factual ﬁndings for clear error and his legal rulings de novo. See Santos, 830 F.3d at 1001. On appeal, Burgos Noeller oﬀers three reasons why the magistrate judge erred in certifying his extradition: (A) the ar- rest warrant that Mexico submitted was invalid, so that the submission was insuﬃcient under Article X, Section 3 of the treaty; (B) there was no probable cause to believe that he committed the crime for which extradition was sought; and (C) it would violate his due process and equal protection rights to extradite him before his claims for asylum, withholding of removal, and Convention Against Torture relief are adjudicated. We address them in turn. None is persuasive.
To comply with the requirements of the treaty, Mexico provided a certiﬁed arrest warrant for Burgos Noeller. The warrant Mexico submitted was issued by a judge of the Twenty-Fourth Criminal Court in the Federal District on June 12 No. 18-2723 18, 2015. Everyone agrees that this June 18, 2015 warrant was valid when it was issued. Petitioner Burgos Noeller argues, however, that his later amparo proceeding suspended the warrant, ﬁrst temporarily, then indeﬁnitely, rendering it invalid. Without a valid warrant, his argument goes, Mexico failed to satisfy the treaty’s requirements. We treat this as a challenge within the second category of permissible challenges under Fernandez v. Phillips, whether the oﬀense charged falls within the treaty, which we have understood as including whether the treaty’s documentary requirements have been met. See 268 U.S. at 312; DeSilva, 125 F.3d at 1112; Assarsson, 635 F.2d at 1241 (considering whether bilateral treaty required formal charges in requesting country was second category issue, whether request met treaty requirements); see also Oteiza v. Jacobus, 136 U.S. 330, 334 (1890). The terms of this treaty make extradition contingent upon Mexico’s provision of “A certiﬁed copy of [a] warrant of arrest[.]” See Extradition Treaty, Mexico-U.S., art. X, § 3, Feb. 6, 1980, 31 U.S.T. 5059 (1980). Mexico’s request satisﬁed this requirement. Burgos Noeller argues that we should delve into the details of his amparo proceeding in Mexico to determine how they aﬀected the validity of that arrest warrant. Given this facially valid arrest warrant, it is doubtful whether we could properly consider later developments in the courts of the requesting party to decide the validity of the warrant. The treaty is silent on continued validity, but one could argue there is an implied requirement that the warrant remain valid. Compare Sacirbey v. Guccione, 589 F.3d 52, 66−69 (2d Cir. 2009) (where treaty required “a duly authenticated copy of the warrant of arrest,” habeas court found implied condition that issuing No. 18-2723 13 court remain able to enforce it), with In re Assarsson, 635 F.2d at 1244 (where treaty did not expressly require charging document, court hearing habeas petition could not review magistrate’s ﬁnding that person had been properly charged in Sweden). Assuming for the sake of argument that we could consider the challenge, we would need at a minimum compelling, reliable evidence undermining conﬁdence in the warrant’s continued validity. Or, to be more precise, given our limited scope of review, the magistrate judge would have needed compelling, reliable evidence to that eﬀect. On this record, we simply have no idea what happened in Burgos Noeller’s amparo proceedings in Mexico, or even whether they occurred, for that matter. Burgos Noeller has provided the United States courts with no reliable evidence on this subject. All we have are two unauthenticated documents in Spanish that Burgos Noeller asserts are court orders invalidating the warrant and nearly unintelligible translations of unknown origin and reliability. As demonstrated at oral argument, even now Burgos Noeller cannot vouch for the accuracy of these translations, despite the fact that he submitted the documents to a federal court. More fundamentally, extradition proceedings are not vehicles for United States federal courts to interpret and opine on foreign law. Yet by disputing the validity of this warrant, Burgos Noeller asks us to scrutinize and evaluate amparo, “a highly complex legal institution” with which our courts are not suﬃciently familiar. See United States v. Fowlie, 24 F.3d 1059, 1064 (9th Cir. 1994). He asks us to do so based on scant and unsubstantiated evidence. Even if we could ﬁnd a reliable record of Burgos Noeller’s amparo case, to adjudicate the 14 No. 18-2723 validity of the warrant we would need to decide what legal conclusion a Mexican court reached based on its analysis of Mexican laws and criminal procedure. That is simply not our job here. If Burgos Noeller thinks later developments in the Mexican courts have rendered his arrest warrant invalid, that challenge belongs in a Mexican court. United States courts hearing extradition requests have consistently expressed an unwillingness to interpret foreign law to invalidate arrest warrants. See Basic v. Steck, 819 F.3d 897, 901 (6th Cir., 2016) (treaty’s warrant requirement satisﬁed where other documents in record “include the elements of an arrest warrant,” and court “will not second guess [Bosnia’s] determination” that documents amounted to valid warrant); Skaftouros v. United States, 667 F.3d 144, 156, 160−61 n.20 (2d Cir. 2011) (ﬁnding Greek arrest warrant suﬃcient for extradition purposes despite technical errors, rejecting invitation to analyze further warrant’s validity under Greek law, “defer[ring] to the Greek courts, which may consider whether Skaftouros or the Greek prosecutors have the better argument,” and emphasizing that “an extradition judge should avoid making determinations regarding foreign law”); Caltagirone v. Grant, 629 F.2d 739, 744 (2d Cir. 1980) (“Treaty does not contemplate a review of the validity, under Italian law, of the Italian arrest warrants”); see also In re Manea, No. 15 MJ 157, 2018 WL 1110252, at  (D. Conn. Mar. 1, 2018) (“this Court properly relies on the representation of Romanian authorities that such warrant was valid, as required by the Treaty”). The limiting case, which provides the best support for Burgos Noeller’s position, is Sacirbey v. Guccione, 589 F.3d 52 (2d Cir. 2009), but it was quite diﬀerent from this case. At the time No. 18-2723 15 of Sacirbey’s extradition case, the Bosnian court that charged him and issued his arrest warrant no longer existed, and no other Bosnian court had jurisdiction over his case. Id. at 59, 63. “The only state organ not denying possession of the case but rather aﬃrming its possession [was] the oﬃce of the National Prosecutor.” Id. at 59. The Second Circuit granted Sacirbey’s habeas petition, explaining that the treaty’s requirement of a valid arrest warrant presumed the existence of a court system capable of enforcing that warrant. Id. at 67, 69. Two years later, in another extradition case, the Second Circuit clariﬁed just how limited its holding in Sacirbey had been: “Sacirbey stands for the unexceptional proposition that a foreign arrest warrant cannot suﬃce to show that a fugitive is currently charged with an oﬀense, as required by most extradition treaties, where the court that issued the warrant no longer has the power to enforce it.” Skaftouros, 667 F.3d at 160. The court emphasized that its “analysis in Sacirbey was limited to determining whether the requirements of the extradition were met; the majority opinion did not engage in questions of Bosnian law.” Id. The key diﬀerences between the cases show that Sacirbey does not help Burgos Noeller. In Sacirbey, the court had reliable evidence that the arrest warrant against the accused could no longer be enforced by any judicial body in the requesting nation. Critically, to reach that conclusion, the U.S. court did not inquire into or make any determinations about foreign law. Burgos Noeller’s situation is very diﬀerent. The information suggesting that the warrant is no longer valid simply is not reliable. Even if it were reliable, we could not determine its eﬀect without investigating and interpreting Mexican law, and in particular the relationship between the underlying 16 No. 18-2723 prosecution and the amparo proceeding. (If it is anything like the relationship between U.S. criminal proceedings and collateral civil cases challenging a prosecution—think abstention under Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37 (1971)—the issues could be quite nuanced and complex.) The Mexican judicial authority that issued the arrest warrant has not collapsed, as in Sacirbey. Mexico provided the documents required under the treaty. Accordingly, Burgos Noeller’s challenge to the arrest warrant belongs in front of a Mexican court.
Turning to Burgos Noeller’s second issue, we review the magistrate judge’s ﬁnding of probable cause under a deferen- tial standard. We ask only “whether there [was] any competent evidence to support [his] ﬁnding.” Bovio v. United States, 989 F.2d 255, 258 (7th Cir. 1993). In support of its extradition request, Mexico submitted a statement from Jacobo Carrillo’s niece, who says she witnessed the shooting and identiﬁed Burgos Noeller as the killer, as well as a statement from Jacobo Carrillo’s sister, who says she heard the two gunshots that killed her sister and saw Burgos Noeller driving away from the crime scene. Both Jacobo Carrillo’s niece and sister described the murderer driving away in a gray Jetta. Mexico also submitted a statement from one of Burgos Noeller’s coworkers saying that she had recently rented a gray Jetta for him. There was also an autopsy report conﬁrming that Jacobo Carrillo died from two gunshot wounds. We have no trouble here aﬃrming the magistrate judge’s conclusion that there was probable cause to believe that Burgos Noeller is guilty of the crime for which extradition is sought. Burgos Noeller argues, however, that the magistrate judge was wrong to credit Mexico’s evidence. He argues that the No. 18-2723 17 statements from Jacobo Carrillo’s family members are inconsistent, unreliable, and subject to undue inﬂuence from other family members who are biased against him. These arguments challenging the credibility of the evidence against him have no place in extradition hearings. As noted above, an accused in an extradition hearing cannot oﬀer contradictory evidence but only “explanatory” evidence, described as “evidence that ‘explains away or completely obliterates probable cause.’” Santos, 830 F.3d at 992, quoting Mainero v. Gregg, 164 F.3d 1199, 1207 n. 7 (9th Cir. 1999), superseded by statute on other grounds, Pub. L. No. 105-277, § 2242. Evidence that contradicts the demanding country’s proof or poses questions of credibility—i.e., contradictory evidence—is oﬀ-limits. Eain, 641 F.2d at 511. In the extradition proceeding in the United States courts, Burgos Noeller was not entitled to contest the credibility of the statements provided by Jacobo Carrillo’s family. These witnesses’ potential biases and inconsistencies are surely relevant to the ultimate question of Burgos Noeller’s guilt or innocence, but those issues must be addressed in the Mexican criminal justice system, not ours. Burgos Noeller made an oﬀer of proof at his extradition hearing, submitting eleven exhibits and testimony as to his innocence. The exhibits included letters and aﬃdavits of friends and family who spoke to his positive character and also to the danger of retribution he faces from Jacobo Carrillo’s family or Los Pepes if he is returned to Mexico. Burgos Noeller also submitted a report and the testimony of Dr. Nathan P. Jones, who discussed the operation of Los Pepes and the inﬁltration of the Mexican government by organized crime. 2 Dr. Jones oﬀered 2 Dr. Jones has submitted evidence on these topics in other cases, such as Rivas-Pena v. Sessions, 900 F.3d 947, 949 (7th Cir. 2018), where his 18 No. 18-2723 no speciﬁc information about this case, however. Instead, he speculated on alternative, drug-related causes of Jacobo Carrillo’s murder that do not involve Burgos Noeller pulling a trigger, as well as the “likelihood” that Burgos Noeller will be killed if he is returned to Mexico. Dr. Jones concluded that extraditing Burgos Noeller “would facilitate the ability of organized crime,” speciﬁcally Los Pepes, to kill him, and that based on the evidence in the record, Jacobo Carrillo’s murder was likely “a drug-related assassination.” The magistrate judge allowed Burgos Noeller’s oﬀer of proof, of course, to allow him to make a record for further review. But the judge ultimately found the evidence in the oﬀer was not relevant to the probable cause question. In re Noeller, 2018 WL 1027513, at . We agree with the magistrate judge’s decision and reasoning. Burgos Noeller’s oﬀer is relevant both to his ultimate guilt or innocence and to humanitarian arguments against returning him to Mexico. But ultimate guilt or innocence is for the Mexican courts to decide, and the humanitarian arguments must be directed to the executive branch of the United States government. Under the settled rule of non-inquiry, the executive branch has sole authority to consider such humanitarian considerations in deciding on extradition requests. See Hoxha v. Levi, 465 F.3d 554, 563 (3d Cir. 2006) (petitioner should not be granted habeas relief based on his assertions that he will be tortured and may be killed by Albanian authorities if extradited because “such humanitarian considerations are within the purview of the executive branch and generally should not testimony before the immigration judge was key in our decision to reverse the denial of relief under the Convention Against Torture. No. 18-2723 19 be addressed by the courts in deciding whether a petitioner is extraditable”). “Once an individual is certiﬁed by a court as extraditable, the Secretary of State ‘exercises broad discretion and may properly consider factors aﬀecting both the individual defendant as well as foreign relations’ in deciding whether extradition is appropriate.” Hoxha, 465 F.3d at 563, quoting Sidali v. I.N.S., 107 F.3d 191, 195 n.7 (3d Cir. 1997). Courts must therefore “refrain from investigating the fairness of a requesting nation’s justice system, and from inquiring into the procedures or treatment which await a surrendered fugitive in the requesting country.” United States v. Kin-Hong, 110 F.3d 103, 110 (1st Cir. 1997) (internal citations and quotations omitted). This rule of non-inquiry may seem counterintuitive coming from a court that routinely hears claims for asylum or relief under the Convention Against Torture. But the rule of non-inquiry is intended to prevent extradition courts from engaging in improper judgments about other countries’ law enforcement and judicial procedures. More important, the rule “serves interests of international comity by relegating to political actors the sensitive foreign policy judgments that are often involved in the question of whether to refuse an extradition request.” Hoxha, 465 F.3d at 563. In keeping with this rule, the magistrate judge was right to reject Burgos Noeller’s arguments regarding retaliation and his inability to receive a fair trial in Mexico, and we cannot consider the merit of these arguments on review.
Burgos Noeller’s ﬁnal argument is that his due process and equal protection rights were violated when the Board of 20 No. 18-2723 Immigration Appeals held in abeyance, pending the outcome of his extradition, his immigration claims for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture. Such stays, however, are not uncommon where the same person is the subject of both immigration and extradition proceedings. See Barapind v. Reno, 225 F.3d 1100, 1107 (9th Cir. 2000) (“As a matter of course, the BIA has held deportation proceedings in abeyance while extradition proceedings are pending.”). Such stays may often make sense because immigration and extradition proceedings are separate and independent proceedings governed by diﬀerent legal standards and procedures. See id. at 1104−05 (“Extradition from the United States is governed by 18 U.S.C. § 3184 (2000), and provides a separate and independent procedure from exclusion or removal proceedings initiated under the INA for the removal of an alien from the United States.”); Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law § 478, reporters’ note 6 (1987) (“If proceedings for deportation had been initiated prior to receipt of a request for extradition, deportation often will be stayed or withdrawn pending completion of the extradition proceeding.”). The United States government has followed established legal practices in processing Burgos Noeller’s extradition case. It received a valid request from Mexico for extradition, and it acted on that request as it is obliged to do under its extradition treaty with Mexico. The subsequent proceedings have complied with the treaty, applicable statutes, and the U.S. Constitution. Burgos Noeller’s attempt to use this habeas corpus appeal to attack collaterally his losses in his immigration case must fail. Even if the Board committed constitutional error in No. 18-2723 21 refusing to rule on his pending immigration claims, and we see no reason to believe that it did, that would present a separate issue that we have no jurisdiction to consider on this appeal. Separate statutes govern judicial review of Board decisions, including a decision to hold removal proceedings in abeyance. To obtain review of that decision, Burgos Noeller would need to pursue the proper channels for review of Board actions. 3 An eﬀort similar to this case was made and rejected in Barapind, where the Ninth Circuit reviewed a habeas corpus petition seeking relief requiring the Board to vacate its decision to hold immigration proceedings in abeyance pending resolution of an extradition request by India, and enjoining the pending extradition proceeding. 225 F.3d at 1000, 1104, 1109. The court noted that Barapind did “little to explain the source of the district court’s authority to enjoin a pending extradition proceeding, . . . a separate and independent proceeding from his asylum proceedings,” and that “[s]uch relief, if available, must be sought through the extradition proceedings or on subsequent habeas review of an adverse decision in the extradition case.” Id. at 1109. Likewise, Burgos Noeller cannot seek relief from alleged violations in his immigration proceedings in the separate and independent extradition process. Even if the Board does not adjudicate Burgos Noeller’s claims for asylum, withholding, and relief under the Convention Against Torture before his extradition challenge is concluded, he also may present these humanitarian issues to the 3 In his district court reply brief, Burgos Noeller asserted that he “intends to challenge the abeyance order through a claim under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Mandamus and Venue Act.” We express no views on the possibility. 22 No. 18-2723 Secretary of State. “It is the function of the Secretary of State to determine whether extradition should be denied on humanitarian grounds.” Ahmad v. Wigen, 910 F.2d 1063, 1067 (2d Cir. 1990); see also Munaf v. Geren, 553 U.S. 674, 702 (2008) (“The Executive Branch may, of course, decline to surrender a detainee for many reasons, including humanitarian ones.”). The district court’s denial of Burgos Noeller’s habeas corpus petition is AFFIRMED.