What Took Them So Long?

A court in Scotland has ruled that Texas prisons are so inhumane and brutal that they constitute a violation of basic human rights, so a man accused of shooting a security guard cannot be extradited to the United States.

This is particularly interesting because foreign courts are typically very receptive to extradition requests, and loath to rule on the things like prison conditions.

But Texas is, well, Texas, and their prisons are pretty awful, even by the aggressively inhumane standards of the US carceral state.

Late last year, a Scottish court quietly refused what seemed like a routine extradition. It wasn’t that of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose drawn-out efforts to avoid the American prison system have grabbed international headlines for years. Instead, it was that of a relatively unknown Scottish man, Daniel Magee, who’d allegedly shot a security guard in Austin, Texas, in 2016 before fleeing to his native country.

The refusal to send a prisoner back is not unprecedented — but what has raised eyebrows in the legal community is the reason: An Edinburgh judge decided that poor conditions in Texas prisons might constitute an international human rights violation.

“This is the first case I know of where this specific argument about prison conditions has succeeded — normally, the courts are very sympathetic to deporting people,” said University of Nottingham criminologist Dirk van Zyl Smit. “It is a vote of no confidence in a country if you won’t send someone back.”

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More than three decades ago, the European Court of Human Rights issued a landmark decision in the case of Jens Soering, a German man fighting extradition from England to Virginia. Because he faced the death penalty on a charge of murdering his girlfriend’s parents, the European court said he could not be extradited. But the issue wasn’t the death penalty itself — it was the fact that he’d likely spend years in “extreme conditions” on death row, “with the ever-present and mounting anguish of awaiting execution.” That, the court said, would be a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans torture and degrading punishment.

In the end, British officials sent Soering back to the U.S. after officials here offered an “assurance,” a promise not to seek the death penalty. After a 1990 trial, he got two life sentences and was released on parole in 2019.

Over time, his case came to represent an international stand against capital punishment because the court’s ruling made it more difficult to extradite to death penalty states. But it did give American officials a way forward: If they wanted their prisoners back, they could offer assurances. The case also hinted at a bigger question: If death row conditions were deemed inhumane, might American prison conditions outside of death row also run afoul of human rights standards?

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Typically, according to Scottish lawyer and extradition expert Niall McCluskey, bad prison conditions alone — without some additional extenuating circumstance — are not enough to avoid an extradition.

“It’s pretty rare for this to happen with a Western country,” he said. “And it’s pretty rare for non-Western countries as well.”

One important exception was a case involving Russia. In 2012, the European Court deemed the country’s prisons so inhumane they violated international human rights conventions — in part because the cells were too small. That decision, in Ananyev v. Russia, established a standard for cell size: 3 square meters of free space per person, or about 32 square feet.

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Dunne added that some Texas prison cells offer as little as 1.86 square meters of free space per person (about 20 square feet) — well below the standard set in the Ananyev case.In response to questions from the Edinburgh court, Texas prisons officials sent three detailed letters explaining prison procedures and asserting that the agency works to prevent degrading treatment. But the state did not offer any assurances about how Magee would be treated and whether he’d be housed in a big enough cell — so the Scottish court refused to extradite him.

A Texas prison spokesman explained that the agency “could not guarantee specific bed placement” because the process for assigning prisoners to a unit is “dependent on numerous factors such as security level, medical needs, and space availability.”

In late fall, Ross ruled in Magee’s favor, and he was freed.

“This case should be a wake-up call for officials — not just in Texas but all over the U.S. — to realize that many routine conditions of confinement in our nation’s prisons do not measure up to international human rights standards,” said Michele Deitch, a University of Texas at Austin senior lecturer who served as an expert witness in the case. “Some of these conditions are really out of step with what are considered acceptable practices in other Western nations.”

This will not result in a change in conditions in US prisons.

The brutality and casual cruelty of the US Prison-Industrial complex has been been encouraged across the polity. The cruelty is the point, and this is a sign of a sick society.