A Strange Reward for Heroic Action

Floor Speech

A STRANGE REWARD FOR HEROIC ACTION

Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor as I have so many times in the past to address an issue dealing with our extradition policy.

Mr. Speaker, a gentleman by the name of Duane Chapman, a bounty hunter that goes by the name of ``Dog,'' faces the strangest of rewards for heroic action.

In 2003, Mr. Chapman received a tip regarding the whereabouts of a millionaire by the name of Andrew Luster. Mr. Luster was a convicted felon who had fled as an escapee from the California Department of Corrections 6 months earlier by jumping $1 million bail on charges that he drugged and raped three women. He was also on the FBI's Most Wanted List, convicted and sentenced to a term of 124 years of imprisonment in absentia for 86 counts of rape, drug and weapons offenses.

Mr. Chapman went to Mexico to act on this tip and was accompanied by a local Mexican police officer. He was also in communications with U.S. officials, who were aware of his activities.

Much to his credit, Mr. Chapman successfully located Mr. Luster and apprehended him. However, on the way to the jail to book Mr. Luster, Chapman's police escort disappeared, strangely. As a result, Mr. Chapman was detained for several days on the relatively minor charge of deprivation of freedom and conspiracy. Mr. Chapman then returned to the U.S. after posting bail.

Thanks to Dog, a serial rapist is now rightly serving a 124-year sentence and the situation seemed to have worked out for the best. But now, years after the fact, it seems that the Mexican Government is intent on extraditing and prosecuting Mr. Chapman. Incredibly, our State Department seems to have no problem being complicit in these proceedings.

I have written the Department of Justice at least once and the Department of State several times just asking them to justify what they have done. I wanted to figure out exactly what their reasoning is for handling this specific case in this way.

There are a lot of legitimate questions. For instance, how is it possible that the Department of Justice would decide to use taxpayer resources to send U.S. Marshals to Hawaii to take Mr. Chapman into custody?

This is an administration that routinely tells Congress that they cannot secure our borders and immigration system due to lack of resources. We are told that the U.S. Attorney's Office in the border States are simply overwhelmed with cases and cannot prosecute all of the violations, even very serious ones. We are told that ICE can't possibly tackle the task of deporting illegal aliens from the interior of our Nation. We are apparently supposed to accept the presence of roughly 100,000 criminal aliens inside our borders, a number that is growing every year, while the U.S. Marshals track down a successful bounty hunter instead.

After formally apprehending Mr. Chapman and putting him into a bevy of new legal proceedings, the question of extradition is raised. Though my observations of our extradition treaty with Mexico indicate that it is not absolutely binding, conventional wisdom has seemed to assume that the treaty between the U.S. and Mexico requires Chapman's extradition. But it is just this, conventional wisdom. It is not part of the treaty, apparently.

I am not the only one to question whether extradition ought to proceed. One recent news story reported that although the U.S. and Mexico informally agreed to recognize trans-border captures by bounty hunters as extraditable offenses, this provision was never fully incorporated into the extradition treaty. The report indicates that this ``informal'' addition to the treaty came after bounty hunters captured a gentleman by the name of Humberto Alvarez-Machain, a Mexican physician implicated in the torture and execution of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agent. Alvarez-Machain maintained that his capture violated the U.S.-Mexico extradition treaty.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Alvarez-Machain's claim in 1992. In the decision, Justice Rehnquist wrote that the treaty ``says nothing about the obligations of the United States and Mexico to refrain from forcible abductions of people from the territory of the other nation, or the consequences under the treaty if such an abduction occurs.'' That is his quote.

Mexico's Government was upset by the decision which gave rise to its ``informal'' addition to the treaty. Alan Kreczko, then deputy legal adviser to the Secretary of State, then James Baker, said in congressional testimony that the U.S. and Mexican governments had exchanged letters recognizing that trans-border abductions by so-called bounty hunters and other private individuals would be considered extraditable offenses by both nations.

This international dispute should have remained amicably resolved by virtue of the fact that justice has clearly been served in the case of ``Dog'' Chapman. But now that these events have been set in motion anew, the best resolution in which we can hope for would come from the Mexican government and judiciary when they dismiss the charges pending against the Chapmans and also to withdraw their request for extradition.

Let's just say that I am not over optimistic for this stand by Secretary Rice to refuse extradition to Mr. Chapman, and I hope this good deed does not go unpunished.

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