I am not a lawyer, but this seems to prove the state sovereignty issue. It is up to the state to decide how hard to work to retrieve the prisoner. If Texas wants to spend the money they can come get anyone. If California is easy, then the other states can’t tell California to come get their man/women. The sovereign state gets to choose.
Yeah, the incomprehensible LEO jargon in a mainstream message board is just so entertaining I had to stop reading it.
:rolleyes:
USA Today had an article on how surprisingly common it is for states to give low priority to recovering interstate fugitives:
The US Marshal’s also have a fugitive task force which works with local authorities to track and arrest particularly dangerous criminals who abscond. They have been doing a lot of work in the Chicagoland area lately.
Center
Missouri has a similar statute, I wouldn’t be surprised if other states do as well.
It’s kind of interesting how it works, it took a couple of explanations before I finally caught on.
If a person has a warrant from another state and is located here, they aren’t technically arrested on the warrant; they’re arrested for having an outstanding warrant from another state and residinng in Missouri. While they’re being held on that charge, extradition proceedings begin for the issuing state to pick up the subject.
That’s how it works here. There is a statute against being a fugitive from justice. That is what you are arrested and detained for. As pk mentioned earlier most of the out of state warrants state the extradition limits.
Cite?
I have one:
States are, in fact, separately sovereign from the federal government. I grant they are not countries, but they are sovereign entities.
If you’re hanging your hat on “country,” then I agree with you. But if you meant to deny dual sovereignty, I’d ask for a cite.
Like wow man! I didn’t expect that my question about arrest warrants for someone that buggered off who knows where would stimulate such a lively conversation! 
I don’t see the relevance of “…and the authorities don’t know what state”. How is that any different from a criminal fleeing to a location unknown to the authorities within the same state? If you don’t know where the guy is, you can’t arrest him: That’s just a matter of reality, independent of the law.
I recall an article about something similar in Canada. The law is country-wide federal responsibility, but justice and the courts are a provincial responsibility. (Caution - some simplification from/for non-lawyers). Ontario was accused of effectively “exiling” petty offenders. They would issue a warrant and then not bother to chase the person when they left the province. A lot of those types went to BC, and the British Columbia government was getting ticked at being the dumping ground for Ontario trash.
BC would arrest someone on an outstanding warrant, and the Ontario authorities would say “we’re not going to bother to send a policeman there to escort him back. He’s your problem.” But, if the offender was found in Ontario, he was warned, he would be tossed in jail - along with the easy to prove charge of failure to appear. As a result, theyw ere effectively told to leave and on’t come abck.
BC eventually got to the point where they would pay for the escort back to Ontario to get rid of some of these problem offenders.
Not sure if you were replying to my OP or to one of the other respondents. In case you meant the former, I didn’t know that state arrest warrants were automatically enforceable in other states (arrest warrants in Canada are not necessarily Canada wide).
OK, this has gone to the point of being rather sublimely silly. It’s like a bunch of adults insisting that Santa Claus is real, or that swimming less than an hour after eating is a path to certain cramping death, long after the kids are beyond such notions. You’re hanging your hat on a word that’s been taken so far from its original (and still customary) meaning that insisting on it once the reality has been pointed out is worse than pedantry: Even pedantry insists on facts which are correct in the usual meaning of the term.
And I’m not even being pedantic. A pedant would insist on sovereignty being taken as an absolute, and insist that there’s no way for a government to be ‘a little bit sovereign’ any more than a person can be ‘a little bit pregnant’. I’m willing to accept France as sovereign, even though the treaties it’s signed to be part of the EU (and etc.) limit what it’s capable of doing even within its own borders. But Texas, for example, has so much less effective control over what it can do on its own that insisting it’s sovereign is an exercise in redefining the word.
So what you’re saying is that one is an extremely dark gray and the other is an extremely light gray, and we can all agree that they are shades of gray. Right?
Unless you’re entering California, in which case you’d better not be packing fruit.
More like, “Stop pretending pure white is a shade of gray when we can all see it’s whiter than new-fallen snow.” You might be able to defend it based on a very technical definition if you ignore the intent of the words, but insisting on using the word when everyone else has accepted that it doesn’t really fit is perverse.