A US citizen just got convicted of killing his wife in Africa. Trial was in Denver how is this legit?
I guess Zambia declined to charge him? Is this because it was also insurance fraud.
IANAL, but as I understand it, this is one of those powers the federal government has that has never yet been overruled by the courts, so the US currently has the ability to police the behavior of Americans even abroad.
Espionage and child abuse are two such common ones, for instance. It’s a crime for an American to sell/betray classified info regardless of where the American is geographically, and it’s a crime for an American to sexually abuse kids anywhere in the world. And in this case, the woman killed was, presumably, an American, too, which gives the feds some sort of authority jurisdiction.
So I would guess that somehow the feds decided they have some statute authority to go after an American who kills an American, regardless of where it was. I am guessing that either this man flew into Denver upon return to the US and was prosecuted in Denver because that was his first port of entry, or else somehow Denver has been designated as a federal court for this sort of anomaly case.
It sounds like they’re claiming he planned the murder while he was here in the U.S.
Here’s a blog post with a little more explanation on the subject in general:
In RJR Nabisco, the Supreme Court set forth the test for extraterritorial jurisdiction. When determining whether extraterritorial jurisdiction applies, federal courts must examine the following:
- First, has Congress expressly stated that a law applies outside the United States? If so, extraterritorial jurisdiction is appropriate, assuming the statute in question does not violate due process or other Constitutional protections.
- Second, even if Congress has not expressly stated that a law has extraterritorial applications, American laws may still apply to conduct that occurred overseas if some conduct relevant to the statute’s focus took place in the United States.
A case with a similar legal premise was the murder trial of Gabe Watson. The undisputed facts are that Watson and his wife, Tina, went scuba diving in Australia on their honeymoon, and Tina drowned. Watson has maintained that her death was accidental and he tried to save her, but he pleaded guilty in Australia to criminally negligent homicide for failing to rescue her, and served 18 months. But then, at the urging of her family, a prosecutor in their home state of Alabama filed charges of murder and kidnapping, on the theory that he planned her murder back home, and killed her for the life insurance money there. The case was ultimately dismissed. Having read way more about these total strangers than any healthy person ought to have time or inclination for, I am convinced of Watson’s innocence. However, I can’t say the legal theory behind prosecuting him in Alabama wasn’t sound-- if it had happened the way the prosecutor claimed.
I have never understood why planning a crime is a separate crime. I guess they go after people for that who change their minds, I assume all US courts are OK with that concept.
Because many crimes are planned that don’t end up happening for a variety of reasons. Including the police stopping the crime before it happens. But overt acts towards the commission of a crime are often easier to prove.
There’s also the question of what the country in which the crime took place wants to happen. If they really don’t like the US, or if what happened isn’t a crime by their laws, they could refuse to extradite. Though of course, with a country as powerful as the US, that can have consequences. And murder is a crime pretty much everywhere. It might be that Zambia declined to charge him precisely because the US was going to.