Opinion ID: 902495
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the hostage taking charges

Text: The linguistic impediments that trouble Counts One and Two do not beset the charges for hostage taking under 18 U.S.C. § 1203. The statute’s extraterritorial scope is as clear as can be, prescribing punishments against “whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, seizes or detains and threatens to kill, to injure, or to continue to detain another person in order to compel a third person or a governmental organization to do or abstain from doing any act.” 18 U.S.C. § 1203(a). We also need not worry about Charming Betsy’s implications, as § 1203 unambiguously criminalizes Ali’s conduct. Section 1203 likely reflects international law anyway, as it fulfills U.S. treaty obligations under the widely supported International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, Dec. 17, 1979, 18 I.L.M. 1456, 1316 U.N.T.S. 205. See United States v. Lin, 101 F.3d 760, 766 (D.C. Cir. 1996). Nor, as in the case of the federal piracy statute, is there any uncertainty as to the availability of conspiratorial liability, 24 since the statute applies equally to any person who “attempts or conspires to” commit hostage taking. 18 U.S.C. § 1203(a). Faced with this reality, Ali has adopted a different strategy when it comes to Counts Three and Four, swapping his statutory arguments for constitutional ones. He relies on the principle embraced by many courts that the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process may impose limits on a criminal law’s extraterritorial application even when interpretive canons do not. Though this Circuit has yet to speak definitively, see United States v. Delgado-Garcia, 374 F.3d 1337, 1341–43 (D.C. Cir. 2004) (explaining that, even if prosecuting the appellants for their extraterritorial conduct would deprive them of due process, the argument had been waived through their unconditional guilty pleas), several other circuits have reasoned that before a federal criminal statute is given extraterritorial effect, due process requires “a sufficient nexus between the defendant and the United States, so that such application would not be arbitrary or fundamentally unfair.” United States v. Davis, 905 F.2d 245, 248–49 (9th Cir. 1990) (internal citation omitted); see United States v. Brehm, 691 F.3d 547, 552 (4th Cir. 2012); United States v. Ibarguen-Mosquera, 634 F.3d 1370, 1378–79 (11th Cir. 2011); United States v. Yousef, 327 F.3d 56, 111–12 (2d Cir. 2003) (per curiam); United States v. Cardales, 168 F.3d 548, 552–53 (1st Cir. 1999). 6 Others have approached the due 6 Some courts have suggested grouping these decisions into two categories: those that “look for real effects or consequences accruing in the United States before they find [a] nexus” and those that “require only that extraterritorial prosecution be neither arbitrary nor fundamentally unfair, and are not concerned with whether a sufficient nexus exists.” United States v. Campbell, 798 F. Supp. 2d 293, 306–07 (D.D.C. 2011). The distinction may be illusory, with the “nexus” inquiry serving more as a proxy for whether a particular prosecution is unfair. See id. at 307. For 25 process issue in more cautious terms. See United States v. Suerte, 291 F.3d 366, 375 (5th Cir. 2002) (assuming, without deciding, the Due Process Clause constrains extraterritorial reach in order to conclude no violation occurred); United States v. Martinez-Hidalgo, 993 F.2d 1052, 1056 (3d Cir. 1993) (accord). Likewise, the principle is not without its scholarly critics. See, e.g., Curtis A. Bradley, Universal Jurisdiction and U.S. Law, 2001 U. CHI. LEGAL F. 323, 338 (“[I]t may be logically awkward for a defendant to rely on what could be characterized as an extraterritorial application of the U.S. Constitution in an effort to block the extraterritorial application of U.S. law.”). We need not decide, however, whether the Constitution limits the extraterritorial exercise of federal criminal jurisdiction. Either way, Ali’s prosecution under § 1203 safely satisfies the requirements erected by the Fifth Amendment. 7
In support of his due process argument, Ali cites a panoply of cases concerning personal jurisdiction in the context of civil suits. It is true courts have periodically borrowed the language of personal jurisdiction in discussing the due process constraints on extraterritoriality. But Ali’s flawed analogies do not establish actual standards for judicial present purposes, that question is purely academic, as Ali does not tether his argument to a particular version of the due process argument. 7 Ali has not cited—and we have not found—any case in which extraterritorial application of a federal criminal statute was actually deemed a due process violation. Although that does not mean such a result is beyond the realm of possibility, it does suggest Ali’s burden is a heavy one, for he traverses uncharted territory. 26 inquiry; the law of personal jurisdiction is simply inapposite. See United States v. Perez Oviedo, 281 F.3d 400, 403 (3d Cir. 2002). To the extent the nexus requirement serves as a proxy for due process, it addresses the broader concern of ensuring that “a United States court will assert jurisdiction only over a defendant who should reasonably anticipate being haled into court in this country.” United States v. Klimavicius-Viloria, 144 F.3d 1249, 1257 (9th Cir. 1998) (internal quotation marks omitted). What appears to be the animating principle governing the due process limits of extraterritorial jurisdiction is the idea that “no man shall be held criminally responsible for conduct which he could not reasonably understand to be proscribed.” Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347, 351 (1964) (internal quotation marks omitted). The “ultimate question” is whether “application of the statute to the defendant [would] be arbitrary or fundamentally unfair.” United States v. Juda, 46 F.3d 961, 967 (9th Cir. 1995). United States v. Shi, 525 F.3d 709 (9th Cir. 2008), is most on point. Shi dealt with a due process challenge to the defendant’s prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 2280, which implements the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, Mar. 10, 1988, 27 I.L.M. 672, 1678 U.N.T.S. 222. See 525 F.3d at 717–24. Because “the Maritime Safety Convention . . . expressly provides foreign offenders with notice that their conduct will be prosecuted by any state signatory,” due process required no specific nexus between the defendant and the United States. Id. at 723. In other words, the treaty at issue in Shi did what the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages does here: provide global notice that certain generally condemned acts are subject to prosecution 27 by any party to the treaty. 8 We agree with the Ninth Circuit that the Due Process Clause demands no more. That Ali’s Counts Three and Four concern hostage taking and not piracy in the technical sense does nothing to alter Shi’s logic. The Ninth Circuit did reason that “the acts with which Shi is charged constitute acts of piracy” and “[p]rosecuting piracy was the original rationale for creating universal jurisdiction.” Id. Yet strictly speaking, Shi was not charged with piracy but with the separate, albeit analogous, offense of violence against maritime navigation. See 18 U.S.C. § 2280. And it is the “universal condemnation of the offender’s conduct,” not some theory of universal jurisdiction, that drove the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning. 525 F.3d at 723. That is why the court also cited Martinez-Hidalgo, which dealt with narcotics trafficking, see 993 F.2d at 1056—an offense not generally understood to be subject to universal jurisdiction, see RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW § 404. By that standard, hostage taking is also an offense whose proscription “is a result of universal condemnation of those activities and general interest in cooperating to suppress them, as reflected in widely-accepted 8 Interestingly, Shi even offers some insight into our own Circuit’s precedent. Citing our opinion in United States v. Rezaq, 134 F.3d 1121 (D.C. Cir. 1998), the Ninth Circuit found particularly relevant our decision to apply an aircraft hijacking statute to the defendant “without noting any possible due process concerns.” 525 F.3d at 724. Acknowledging that our silence “may have stemmed from any number of reasons,” the court found it “important to note that, like § 2280, the statute in Rezaq was enacted to implement an international agreement to extradite and to prosecute perpetrators of widely-condemned conduct.” Id. Rezaq is not squarely analogous, however, since “hijacking of aircraft,” like piracy, is a universal jurisdiction offense. See 134 F.3d at 1131; RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW § 404. 28 international agreements and resolutions of international organizations.” Id. § 404 cmt. a. Regardless, Shi’s comparison of § 2280 to piracy was an alternate holding, not a necessary premise to its conclusion that a treaty may provide notice sufficient to satisfy due process—a fact even Ali concedes. See Appellee Br. 37. Ali also complains that though China was a signatory to the relevant international agreement in Shi, Somalia is not a party to the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, 9 meaning his home nation has not consented to U.S. criminal jurisdiction over its hostage-taking nationals. True, as a matter of international law, this case may not be so obvious as those in which “the flag nation has consented to the application of United States law to the defendants.” United States v. Angulo-Hernández, 565 F.3d 2, 11 (1st Cir. 2009). But Ali mistakes the due process inquiry for the customary international law of jurisdiction. “Whatever merit [these] claims may have as a matter of international law, they cannot prevail before this court. . . . Our duty is to enforce the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States, not to conform the law of the land to norms of customary international law.” Yunis, 924 F.2d at 1091. Whatever due process requires here, the Hostage Taking Convention suffices by “expressly provid[ing] foreign offenders with notice that their conduct will be prosecuted by any state signatory.” Shi, 525 F.3d at 723. That is what Shi said. It did not hold that due process depends on the participation of the defendant’s nation in the agreement. 9 Somalia does not join most other nations in this regard. As of May 28, 2013, the treaty has 39 signatories and 170 parties. See United Nations Treaty Collection, International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, available at http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?mtdsg_no=XVIII- 5&chapter=18⟨=en. 29 Finally, Ali asserts that “[f]or non-citizens acting entirely abroad, a jurisdictional nexus exists when the aim of that activity is to cause harm inside the United States or to U.S. citizens or interests.” United States v. Al Kassar, 660 F.3d 108, 118 (2d Cir. 2011). In Al Kassar, these interests were present because “[t]he defendants’ conspiracy was to sell arms to FARC with the understanding that they would be used to kill Americans and destroy U.S. property.” Id. There is good reason to believe that whatever “nexus” due process might demand is not “jurisdictional” in the proper sense of the term. See Delgado-Garcia, 374 F.3d at 1343 (“Appellants’ . . . . assertion is a claim that the due process clause limits the substantive reach of the conduct elements of 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a), not a claim that the court lacks the power to bring them to court at all.”). But even assuming Al Kassar’s characterization is right, the decision only tells us when such 2013) (“‘P ⊃ Q’ does not mean ‘¬P ⊃ ¬Q.’”). And in any a nexus exists, not when it is absent. See New England Power Generators Ass’n v. FERC, 707 F.3d 364, 370 n.3 (D.C. Cir. event, this quote from Al Kassar cannot sustain the expansive construction Ali accords it. Otherwise, the Fifth Amendment would preclude prosecution even of universal jurisdiction offenses like piracy. Al Kassar also states, “Fair warning does not require that the defendants understand that they could be subject to criminal prosecution in the United States so long as they would reasonably understand that their conduct was criminal and would subject them to prosecution somewhere.” 660 F.3d at 119. Other courts have made similar statements. See, e.g., Martinez-Hidalgo, 993 F.2d at 1056 (“Inasmuch as the trafficking of narcotics is condemned universally by lawabiding nations, we see no reason to conclude that it is ‘fundamentally unfair’ for Congress to provide for the 30 punishment of persons apprehended with narcotics on the high seas.”). While Ali protests that the Second Circuit cannot have meant what it said, the consequence of a literal reading is not the limitless prosecutorial power he envisions. Given presumptions like the Charming Betsy and extraterritoriality canons, conduct abroad would only be subject to statutes with clear foreign scope (like § 1203). In fact, since it is those canons and not the Fifth Amendment that have thus far restrained such prosecutorial abuse, Ali’s claim that the government’s position somehow vitiates essential protections seems dubious. Lastly, we mention that the district court initially denied dismissal of Counts Three and Four. See Ali II, 885 F. Supp. 2d at 45 (“Because the hostage taking charges allege the same high-seas conduct for which Ali is lawfully subject to prosecution for piracy, and in light of the notice that the Hostage Taking Convention provides, the Court concludes that there is nothing fundamentally unfair about Ali's prosecution under § 1203.”). It was only once the district court doubted the government’s ability to prove either piracy count that it decided haling Ali into a U.S. court to answer charges of hostage taking would violate due process. See Ali III, 885 F. Supp. 2d at 61–62. Since we have reversed the district court’s decision narrowing the scope of Count Two, the logic of Ali II, which allowed Ali’s charges for hostage taking to proceed, is once again applicable.
For his final salvo, Ali fires a barrage of “Special Criminal Law Concerns” he claims are relevant to his right to due process. We respond in kind: 31 • Ali laments the “lack of vicinage” between his alleged crime and the legal forum set for his prosecution. See United States v. Cores, 356 U.S. 405, 407 (1958) (“The provision for trial in the vicinity of the crime is a safeguard against the unfairness and hardship involved when an accused is prosecuted in a remote place.”). But Counts Three and Four introduce no unique detriment to Ali’s defense beyond that already inherent to his piracy prosecution. And the sweep of Ali’s argument is overinclusive, as it would seemingly defeat all extraterritorial applications of criminal statutes. • Ali next targets the length of his pretrial detention. While he is correct that excessive pretrial detention may in certain circumstances deprive a defendant of his right to a speedy trial, “courts must still engage in a difficult and sensitive balancing process.” Barker v. Wingo, 407 U.S. 514, 533 (1972). Beyond stating the length of his detention, Ali has offered no specifics on how his rights have been violated or his defense prejudiced. • Invoking double jeopardy norms, Ali contends his susceptibility to future prosecution in, say, Denmark or Somalia renders inappropriate his prosecution in the United States. Though he acknowledges the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on double jeopardy does not constrain prosecutions by separate sovereigns, see United States v. Rashed, 234 F.3d 1280, 1282 (D.C. Cir. 2000), he nonetheless tries to smuggle in the underlying principle via the Due Process Clause. To invoke the principle of double jeopardy in order to thwart a well-recognized exception to the Double Jeopardy Clause is already strange. Yet even more mystifying is his attempt to make the point in the first forum to subject him to criminal charges. It seems such an argument would be more 32 compelling in the next forum (if any) that opts to prosecute him. Along with these due process concerns, Ali discusses principles of international comity. The issue, as well as its import for due process, is addressed in cursory fashion. No matter. An amorphous reference to international comity is no basis for gainsaying the clearly expressed intention of the United States, by both treaty and statute, to prosecute hostage takers for their offenses abroad.