Opinion ID: 4416812
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Events in Lithuania

Text: In applying political oﬀense exceptions to extradition treaties, factual details matter, so we review events in some detail. Neringa Venckiene worked as a judge in Lithuania from 1999 until 2012. Her brother was Drasius Kedys. Kedys had a daughter with his then-girlfriend Laimute Stankunaite. As of 2008, the couple had separated and Kedys had full custody of their daughter, Venckiene’s niece. Sometime in 2008, when she was four years old, the girl told her grandmother that she was being sexually abused by three men. The men were No. 18-2529 7 eventually identiﬁed as public oﬃcials: Andrius Usas, an assistant to the Speaker of the Lithuanian parliament, Jonas Furmanavicius, a Kaunas Regional Court Judge, and Vaidas Milinis, the President of the Kaunas Regional Court. Law enforcement authorities were notiﬁed about the girl’s claims, but according to Venckiene, “the case was purposefully delayed, investigations and complaints were ignored, and the case shifted hands for months.” In response to these delays, Venckiene wrote a book about the pedophilia case and its stagnated investigation entitled Drasius’s Hope to Save the Girl. Venckiene believes that what her niece experienced was part of a larger pedophilia network in Lithuania. She thinks that the Lithuanian network is related to a pedophilia scandal that took place in Latvia in 2000 and in which several highranking oﬃcials participated. On October 5, 2009, Furmanavicius and Stankunaite’s sister were murdered. Lithuanian authorities suspected Kedys of committing these crimes, but Kedys himself disappeared soon after that. His body was eventually discovered on the bank of a lagoon. The government declared his death accidental, caused by alcohol-induced asphyxiation, but Venckiene asserts that an independent criminologist found no alcohol in Kedys’s system. Venckiene was awarded custody of his daughter, her niece, pending resolution of the pedophilia case. In June 2010, Usas was also found murdered. Venckiene continued to criticize corruption in Lithuania. On November 17, 2010, in a conversation with journalists, she publicly condemned the Lithuanian court system for its corruption. She asserts that the chairman of the Lithuanian Judicial Council censured her for her comments and subjected her to ethical hearings based on a charge of insulting or 8 No. 18-2529 humiliating the court. She further asserts that a pretrial investigation into whether she had actually broken any laws through these comments was discontinued in January 2011 after the prosecutor found no evidence to suggest that she had broken the law. Venckiene says, however, that in February 2011, the head of the Judicial Council successfully petitioned to extend the statute of limitations on this charge of “humiliating the court.” In 2012, these comments were cited to support revoking Venckiene’s judicial immunity. According to Lithuania, at some point in 2010, Venckiene also conducted illegal surveillance on public individuals she suspected of pedophilia and Stankunaite. On December 16, 2011, a court ordered Venckiene to return her niece to the custody of her niece’s mother, Kedys’s former girlfriend, Stankuanaite. The court ordered the transfer on two separate occasions. Both times the girl refused to go with her mother. On March 23, 2012, Stankunaite came to Venckiene’s home with a bailiﬀ and about 25 police oﬃcers to execute the court’s order and take back her daughter. The attempt was unsuccessful, and the girl was traumatized by the incident. A video recording of the attempted seizure was posted to the internet and received national attention. The story alerted the public to the pedophilia incidents. Hundreds of people began camping out around Venckiene’s home to help protect the girl. On May 17, 2012, the police again attempted to remove the girl from Venckiene’s home. The criminal charges against Venckiene relevant to this appeal are based on the events of that date. Venckiene describes the encounter as violent. She says that oﬃcers broke down her door and physically removed her niece from her lap before covering the girl’s face No. 18-2529 9 with a blanket soaked in psychotropic substances intended to subdue her. Venckiene reports that she and several protesters went to the hospital seeking treatment for injuries inﬂicted by the oﬃcers. The police oﬃcers who executed the custody transfer described Venckiene as aggressive and hysterical. They said that she refused to allow the oﬃcers to communicate with the girl and even punched one oﬃcer in the face. After her niece was removed, Venckiene became more outspoken. She published another book, Way of Courage, which covered the pedophilia case and leveled criticisms against the Lithuanian judicial system, prosecution, and courts. On June 26, 2012, Venckiene’s judicial immunity was revoked. She then resigned from her judicial position and became politically active. Her second book had inspired the creation of Way of Courage, a political party that organized protests, circulated petitions, and fostered dialogues on internet forums and blogs. Venckiene became the face of the party during its campaign for the October 2012 parliamentary election in Lithuania. Way of Courage won seven seats in the election; Venckiene was elected the party’s chair. Venckiene’s political tenure was short-lived. The prosecutor general petitioned the Lithuanian parliament to remove Venckiene’s parliamentary immunity so that she could be arrested for charges related to the May 17th removal of her niece. Venckiene’s parliamentary immunity was in fact removed on April 13, 2013. At some point in 2012, Venckiene was notiﬁed that she was suspected of several criminal oﬀenses. Venckiene refused to accept formal service of process and went into hiding. On April 8, 2013, Venckiene ﬂew from Germany to the United States. She applied for asylum immediately and has since been living and working in Illinois. 10 No. 18-2529