So, back in 1985, Mohammed Ali Hamadi was part of some Hezbollah partisans who hijacked a TWA flight from Athens to Rome. During the course of the hijacking the plane touched down in Beirut, and the body of an American was dumped onto the runway. Witnesses later identified Hamadi as the killer. The hijackers were not captured at that time.
Then in 1987, Hamadi was caught in Frankfurt Airport with explosives in his luggage. The US asked Germany to extradite him so he could be tried for murder, but instead he was prosecuted in Germany. He was convicted of both hijacking the plane and the murder of Robert Dean Stethem, the American citizen, and given a life sentence. Hamadi was paroled last Thursday, after serving almost 19 years in prison and returned to Lebanon, his home country. The US is apparently seeking to get him extradited from Lebanon so he can be tried (again) for the murder of Stethem.
I assume there are no double jeopardy problems with a person being tried for a crime by both the US and Germany (or any two sovereign countries), but I’m curious about how often something like this comes up. Are there similar cases where someone has been convicted and spent time in prison in two different countries for the same crime as will happen to Hamadi if he is tried and convicted here?
I don’t know about legally, but trying someone for a crime they were convicted of and served time for in another country clearly poses some problems politically. IMHO you’re basically saying you don’t recognize the legal system of the other country.
This news did strike me as very odd, both him being released so soon, and the U.S. declaration to re-try. Like the OP, I’d like to know if this type of thing has happened before. Anyone?
I’m not a lawyer, but I can recall a recent incident where this sort of thing came up. Last month an Australian citizen was executed in Singapore for drug smuggling. A prominent barrister in Australia tried to run a private prosecution and wanted extradition to Australia in order to save his life. IIRC the action failed due to being thought of rather too late in the day, but they are proceding with similar attempts regarding two more Australians on death row in Vietnam.
It wasn’t that soon. An average life sentence in Germany is about 20 years. Convicts get the first chance of parole after 15 years. Only about one in six will literally stay in prison for the rest of their life.
It probably depends on the law of the countries involved. The french criminal code adresses specifically this issue and IIRC you can’t be tried again after you’ve been sentenced and served your sentence in a foreign country for the same crime. But even then, it could depends on the definition of same crime. Let’s assume Bin Laden for instance is caught and tried in country X for the unlawful deaths of country X’s citizens in the WTC attack . Could he be latter extradited, tried and sentenced for the unlawful deaths of country Z’s citizens during the same event? I assume this also would depends of both countries’ laws.
Interesting article, Hawthorne. It looks like these lawyers in Australia are looking to charge those people with what is technically a different crime (“conspiring to import heroin into Australia”) though, even if it’s, more or less, for the same basic actions (which ties into clairobscur’s point about what’s the same crime). That makes it a bit different from Hamadi’s situation, as he’d be facing the exact same charge (murder) in the US as he faced in Germany, as I understand it.
Anyway, to veer slightly off-topic for a second, what I find odd about Hamadi’s case is that he was tried in Germany to begin with. The practical reason for his being tried there, as I understand it, is that Germany didn’t want to extradite him to the US where he could have faced the death penalty. Fair enough, and I don’t want to debate the rightness of that, as this obviously isn’t the forum for it, but I’m not sure what jurisdictional claim Germany would have had for the murder. Germany, as far as I know, has never claimed “universal jurisdiction”. The only thing I can think of, is that while the victim’s body was dumped in Lebanon, the murder itself may have occured in international airspace, thus making it analogous to piracy, or other crimes committed “on the high seas”, that are traditionally able to be tried by any country.
Maybe someone who knows the facts of this case better, or who has more knowledge about extraterritorial jurisdiction, will be by.
So Germany had the choice of extraditing or prosecuting. If it chose not to extradite, it was bound by the Convention to assert universal jurisdiction and prosecute.
You’re welcome. I didn’t “know” it either until I remembered something about universal jurisdiction, hijacking, and some treaty. Then I started Googling.