[Note: don’t know if this belongs in GD]
Had the killer not ended his life and had been detained by the authorities, what would have happened? I’m not up to speed on his background (ie was he an american citizen or not), but let’s assume he was a foreign national. Obviously he would have been arrested, but what then? Would he have been extradited back to his home country (once again, assuming it was S.Korea)? Or would there be sufficient grounds to hold him in U.S. custody? Would the death penalty have been an option? I have a faint memory of Virginia being a proponent of capital punishment (and if they’re not, assume they were, or just hypothesize that this had happened in Texas). Sorry if this was awkwardly formulated.
Any criminal charge can get a noncitizen resident deported, but no chance that would have happened to Cho. Viginia would have tried and executed him.
If it had happened in Texas, he’d already have been executed.
Any chance the S.Korean diplomats would have raised hell over the issue of him being tried and executed in the US?
From the comments of the young man’s relatives, I think they might not fight all that hard to extradite.
It’s possible, but I doubt they’d have said much, given the shocking nature of the crime and the fact that South Korea has the death penalty as well.
As far as “extradition” goes, that generally applies to a fugitive who flees to another jurisdiction, and the jurisdiction where he commited the crime tries to extradite him back. Cho probably didn’t break any South Korean laws during the shooting, and he very much placed himself under the jurisdiction of Virginia. If he committed crimes against the State of Virginia and was arrested in Virginia, there wouldn’t have been any reason to extradite him to anywhere else. South Korea could have protested the execution of one of its nationals by a U.S. state, but that doesn’t prevent us from doing it.