Court Opinion

ID: 9474515
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:00:10.065258+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:08.906345
License: Public Domain

DUNIWAY, Circuit Judge
(concurring in the judgment):
I concur in the judgment, but I cannot concur in the lengthy opinion of Judge Reinhardt and the very extensive dicta that it expounds.
I agree that the magistrate had jurisdiction, including jurisdiction to determine whether the offenses with which Quinn is charged were of a political character. I agree that the district court had jurisdiction bn habeas corpus to decide that question and that we have jurisdiction on appeal to consider it. I have no doubt that the evidence is sufficient to enable, indeed, to require, the magistrate, the district court, and this court to say that the offenses charged against Quinn are extraditable offenses, and that the only basis upon which extradition could be denied is the treaty provision that “extradition shall not be granted if ... the offense ... is regarded by the requested party, [the United States], as one of a political character.”
My principal difficulty is with part V of Judge Reinhardt’s thoughtful and careful opinion, and especially with part V, B, 2, and the geographical limitation announced there, reading as follows:
Equally important, the uprising component serves to exclude from coverage under the exception criminal conduct that occurs outside the country or territory in which the uprising is taking place. The term “uprising” refers to a revolt by indigenous people against their own government or an occupying power. That revolt can occur only within the country or territory in which those rising up reside. By definition acts occurring in other lands are not part of the uprising.
.The limitation may be useful to us in this case, but I doubt that it is a valid one. To consider an old example, let us suppose that the treaty was in effect immediately following the revolutionary war, and his majesty’s government sought to extradite John Paul Jones for piracy in British waters. Would we grant extradition because there was no uprising in Great Britain? Assume that we had a comparable treaty with the government of Nicaragua. Suppose that, today, a citizen of Nicaragua, active in the so-called contras, were to sink a vessel owned by the Sandinista government on the high seas, and flee to this country. Would we grant extradition because his act did not take place within the territorial waters of Nicaragua?
Particularly today, with the airplane, the helicopter, the high speed motor vehicle, the railroad, the speedboat and submarine, genuinely revolutionary activities can take place outside the geographic boundaries of the requesting state. I fear that if we adopt the geographic limitation propounded in the opinion today, we will find ourselves trying to work our way around it tomorrow.
*819I much prefer the rationale of the Seventh Circuit in Eain v. Wilkes, 7 Cir., 1981, 641 F.2d 504. There, the court held that the political character of the offense provision does not apply to “the indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population” (p. 521). I cannot believe that the framers of the treaty intended that the exception would embrace the kind of activities that the record in this case reveals. As the Eain court said, “We recognize the validity and usefulness of the political offense exception, but it should be applied with great care lest our country become a social jungle and an encouragement to terrorists everywhere.” (p. 520)
This case does not involve the “random bombing” that Eain involved. But every letter bomb to which Quinn was connected was directed to an innocent, albeit influential, civilian who had no direct connection to the troubles in Northern Ireland. Nor does the fact that Tibbie was a policeman make any difference. The evidence does not indicate that Quinn knew or believed that he was a policeman. Moreover, it would make no difference if he did either know it or believe it. The killing of Tibbie was an attempt to avoid arrest for extraditable offenses. The fact that Tibbie was a policeman cannot metamorphose that killing, which, on its face, was a murder to escape arrest, into an offense regarded by the United States as one of a political character.
I concur in part VII C of the opinion, and in the judgment.