From what I’d seen on MSNBC a few days ago or so, the reports were that the trip wasn’t planned in advance.
Good link Mangetout. Intriguingly his eBay feedback is mostly positive until around January 7, when it becomes uniformly negative. This is arond the time they moved house. Looks like the shit really hit the fan…
I wonder if he is acting under the advice of legal counsel.
No, to repeat this again, Massachusetts does not have the death penalty. In the United States you can only be sentenced to death if you commit a crime that falls under a jurisdiction in which capital punishment is an available punishment.
38 states have capital punishment as does the federal government, but if you commit your crimes in one of the 12 states that doesn’t have capital punishment, you can’t be executed and that’s regardless of where you fly to after committing your crime.
People run to other countries often times because they think it gives them a better chance of escaping law enforcement. If he is indeed guilty then going to the UK is not a good idea as the UK and US typically are very compliant with one another on extraditions.
I finally found text of an extradition treaty, although it’s apparently a new one that has amended some things and has yet to be ratified (at least as of 2003, which is when the document is dated.)
Under this treaty this guy really would not have any legal ability to protest extradition. The treaty says extradition cannot be denied on basis of nationality so that means the UK would be required to extradite its own citizens and vice versa, and it says that as long as the executive in the requesting state agrees to waive the death penalty then it cannot be denied on those grounds either.
89% positive feedback. That’s the lowest I’ve ever seen for a seller with more than 10 sales.
Maybe one of the 11% decided to kill this guy and his clan to avenge the failure of the MAKE.MONEY.FAST.IN.REAL.ESTATE system he was sold?
I’ve always thought that a particularly thorough way of getting revenge would be wiping out a target’s family, then taking them out…
Before January '06, He didn’t have too many negative feedback items, just a couple of instances where it seems he wasn’t clear that the merchandise was copied or not. All of the really bad negative feedback items started coming in a row starting early January. In all of those they were either unable to contact him or never received their items. I wonder what was going on in the house at that time?
Thanks for clarifying this for me. Much appreciated.
My dad has four older half-siblings, and before I was born, I had a cousin with a bad heart. He died very young, between the ages of 2 and 4, and his dad had custody of him because my aunt wasn’t interested in caring for a sick child. She didn’t attend his funeral because she would have missed a folk music concert if she’d gone home. So…you don’t need to be a murderer to miss your child’s funeral, just massively self-involved.
For some reason Dad was never keen on us meeting her, and we never have…
how do you search for user profiles in ebay?
:eek: Un-fucking-believable !!! :eek:
I thought that people that heartless only existed in bad movies.
If I was innocent and the citizen of another country and could make it there before the police took my passport as a “person of interest”, I would go for it. I don’t trust that the police would do a through investigation because a lot of them are lazy assholes who would rather close a case than find the guilty person. And DA’s who are thinking about their conviction rate rather than justice. Think about the innocent people who’s lives they have ruined because they latched onto the parents or husband/wife and never went any further. For example, that couple that was convicted of murdering their baby and later found to be innocent. I would never put myself in the hands of the authorities and trust that they had my best interests at heart. And a trial and paying an attorney to hopefully prove your innocence would bankrupt you; and the outcome is based on a random bunch of people who may or may not care or even understand the evidence, which can be techincal these days. To say nothing of the “experts” who are paid a lot of money and lie or fabricate on the stand. For example, the woman who killed her five children was found guilty and the idea of her being insane was dismissed as a defense because a so-called expert said that she must have watched an episode of Law and Order that gave her the idea; later it was found no such episode existed. Now, her original conviction is vacated and hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer’s money will be spent to retry her when they could just admit her to a medical facility and leave her there for life.
I had one personal brush with the law and a friend had an experience that would make you lose faith in the police forever as far as fairness and justice being upheld. So, yes I would be on a plane and handle it from where I was safe from this so-called “best justice system in the world.”
suezeekay reminds me of a few things about the negative perception of the US legal system that indeed would make many a foreigner skip the continent if anything bad were to happen.
Remember that Danish couple in 1996/97 that was arrested for leaving the baby carriage out in front of the restaurant in New York while they ate? She was arrested, illegally strip-searched (she won that case), was denied access to the consulate, etc etc etc…That was HUGE over here. People here wondered about the sanity of the US legal system.
And then you hear about all of the different laws in different States and how certain people will be prosecuted and some won’t and you can sometimes plea bargain, but sometimes not and that some people get released on this thing called bail after raping and murdering a 12 year old, and on and on and on…
Yeah, I am going to reserve judgement on this guy. If I were him, either guilty or innocent, I’d leave town FAST.
-Tcat
Of course leaving town doesn’t make any sense because in the UK they will extradite him back to the United States the second the authorities here request his extradition.
And when his trial comes around the jury will think he’s guilty as sin when it is revealed he fled to the UK after the murders.
You guys seem to act like once he left the country he can’t be prosecuted, he’s going to be brought back within days if the authorities in the U.S. wish to file charges against him.
Furthermore, the U.S. legal system isn’t as bad as it is portrayed, nothing is as bad as its portrayed here in the U.S. where we tend to exagerrate everything. Some advocacy groups tend to exaggerate the “failure rate” of the U.S. justice system, but the total number of people to be proven innocent after conviction is so small it is numerically insignificant.
And think of all those people convicted wrongly in the UK. The Darvell brothers, the M25 three, the Cardiff three, Jonathan Jones, Danny McNamee, Adolph Beck, Timothy Evans, Stephen Downing, Judith Ward, and these are just cases that were prominent enough to get media attention.
No justice system managed by humans is perfect.
I didn’t notice anyone particularly saying that; the legal issues of extradition and the speculated behaviours of a frightened man are not necessarily consistent with each other.
Well they were specifically saying they’d leave the country since they don’t trust American justice.
If I was a lawyer, and I’m not, I’d never advise my clients to do something that by its very nature would help with my conviction (leave the area and go overseas.) Especially when it didn’t offer them any chance of avoiding prosecution.
Yes, but those cases only started after the State made the decision to actively revisit doubtful cases in a more impartial manner. Then the flood gates opened. This has yet to happen in the US where the populace is far more pro-judiciary and anti-“criminal”.
I wonder if the fact that this guy is a British citizen has any bearing on his extradition?
Also: Article 7 of the UK-US treaty covers the death penalty, stating that:
“the executive authority may refuse extradition unless the Requesting State provides an assurance that the death penalty will not be imposed or, if imposed, will not be carried out”.
I don’t know if MA has the death penalty. If so, they couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t be imposed for murder.
In my case, it isn’t just perception, although I’ll admit I’ve been influenced by the media. Mostly it involves personal experience or secondhand experience. As my business law professor used to say, don’t ever, ever get caught up in the legal system if you can avoid it. Once it gets going, it rolls along like a steamroller, crushing everything in it’s path.
MA does not have the death penalty.
Coming in late to this thread, kudos to Martin Hyde for extraordinarily thoughtful answers.
In most (if not all) jurisdictions, the ethical rules would prohibit an attorney from advising a witness to leave the jurisdiction. At best, the husband is a witness (if not to the crime, then to the family circumstances before the shooting). So, in addition to the fact that leaving the jurisdiction simply delays the time that he would have to face the music in the US, lawyers can’t violate the ethical rules.
For others interested, there are lots of GQ threads about extradition that may shed some light (some deal with US inter-state extradition).
It does, in the sense that the treaty referenced by Martin Hyde would control the rules governing his extradition. Extradition really is just an administrative task. Assume that Massachusetts indicts this guy; the Massachusetts authorities transmit the indictment to the appropriate authorities in England. The gentleman in question is arrested and brought before an appropriate magistrate in England. That judicial officer determines that the indictment’s t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, and then orders the defendant turned over to Massachusetts. There is no mini-trial, no proving up of evidence, etc. It is purely administrative.
There really isn’t any basis to assume that this guy is “safe” simply because he managed to flee the country. He didn’t hide, we know where he is, and as soon as they get enough evidence, they can go get him. No big deal. The real benefit to his having fled the jurisdiction (assuming he killed them) is that he has a much larger area within which to dispose of his clothing and the gun. Likely too much time has passed to check for other biological or chemical markers on his body that could provide evidence that he had recently fired a gun, for example, or gotten blood on himself.
As others have noted, because Massachusetts has no death penalty, the British authorities have no reason to intervene on his behalf to get a commitment that he will not face death. The fact that states other than Massachusetts have a death penalty, and the fact that the federal government has a death penalty, is irrelevant, since he is not charged with crimes in those other states or by the federal government. Assuming he killed his family, I frankly can’t see how a run-of-the-mill domestic murder could possibly implicate a federal death penalty crime (unless there is a national park running through their living room).