This is not about the guy who murdered his family. This case involves an American suspect and a Mexican victim and happened in Mexico.
I’m adding the link to an article about an awful crime that happened in Tijuana. The article is worth a read but my question is about one statement in it. When interviewed the Mexican prosecutor said if the defendant’s family paid restitution to the family he could spend his sentence in an American jail and not a Mexican jail. Is it a law or treaty that allows this to happen? How does it work? Once in US custody are US courts bound by any ruling that was made in Mexican courts? How is parole handled at the end of sentencing? Time off for good behavior? Feel free to answer other questions about the subject I forgot to ask.
The United States has a number of treaties with other countries to permit the transfer of prisoners back to their home countries (pursuant to 18 USC 4100 et seq). Also the US is part of two multilateral conventions for the same. I suppose the primary purpose of this is to send aliens who commit crimes in the United States back to their home countries, but at least several of these treaties (including the one with Mexico) is bilateral. See 18 U.S.C. 4102(2) (authoriing the Attorney General to “receive custody of offenders under a sentence of imprisonment, on parole, or on probation who are citizens or nationals of the United States transferred from foreign countries and as appropriate confine them in penal or correctional institutions, or assign them to the parole or probation authorities for supervision”).
The BOP website discusses it here. The DOJ website discussed it here.
If I’m reading the treaty correctly, once the transfer occurs the prisoner is subject to the rules about early release and parole that are in the country they were transferred to and the country where the crime occurred has no say in the matter.
Omar Kadr was a child soldier in Afghanistan - he was 14 when he was arrested on the battlefield and sent to Guantanamo. It took until 2012 for him to agree to plead guilty in exchange for a prisoner transfer fromt The USA to Canada. (His father was a friend of bin Laden and took the family from Canada to Afghanistan when he was younger).
So similar deal - many countries have agreements to transfer prisoners. After all, many countries don’t want to have to spend the money to warehouse a criminal for years and then deport them, when they can be sure that sending the person back home is not a get out of jail free card.
As I gather from the comment in the article, “if he pays restitution” then - both countries have to agree to a transfer. Mexico probably figures the person or his family have a decent amount of money to help compensate the victim’s family, so have made that a condition of transfer. The incentive to pay up is presumably based on the difference between Mexican and American jail conditions. But reading the start of the article, one wonders whether there is any money available - but the article says the lawyer they talk to is paid for by his family, so perhaps there is a decent amount of money available.
I think that’s right. Except that the country of conviction retains the right to pardon; retains jurisdiction over judicial challenges to the sentence; and the receiving country’s rules can’t result in a longer sentence than if the prisoner had remained in the country of conviction.
Just using google it was pretty easy to find out where his mother lives (his father is dead). It’s a modest ranch house. It may seem to cost a lot but not by New Jersey real estate standards. It does not appear that he comes from money at all.