Law & Order's stock in trade, from the beginning, is the "ripped from the headlines" story -- taking an incident that happened here on Earth-Prime and spinning a thinly disguised version. But the other day, I caught I rerun that followed a news story I was very familiar with, as it happened near where I live, about a killer who fled to Israel to escape prosecution.
It was interesting to see, especially as it totally made up the crime; they wanted, I guess, to just deal with the aftermath. As it was, the real-world case was far more interesting.
The episode began with a burglary at a clothing store that specializes in leather jackets, and the discovery that the proprietor, who had stayed late to do inventory, had been killed. The investigation discovered that the burglary was staged and the killer was an employee, who was paid to do so by the son of the victim's business partner. Said partner spirited the son away to his apartment in Tel Aviv.
As the prosecutors tried to figure how to get the son back in New York, the city councilman for that district offered to help, although he was pushing the idea that the son was exercising his rights under Israel's Law of Return, which allows any Jew from anywhere in world to come there and seek citizenship. But you know Jack McCoy and Abbie Carmichael just thought he was a rat looking for a place to hide, so they worked with the U.S. and Israeli state departments to extradite him.
They found a loophole -- our killer wasn't born Jewish; he was adopted, and his mother was Irish Catholic. Then they went to a rabbinical court in Brooklyn to argue that he hadn't properly converted to Judaism. The rabbis ruled that only two of the three criteria had been met: the guy had been circumcised and had adopted a Hebrew name, but his lawyer couldn't produce proof he had had a ritual bath called a mikvah. With that ruling, the guy was extradited and stood trial; in the end, the councilman brokers a deal where the guy pleaded guilty to murder but wouldn't face the death penalty and would serve his time in prison in Israel.
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The real-world case this was based on is about one Samuel Sheinbein, a straight-up sociopath who killed a fellow student at his Rockville, Md., high school in 1997 as practice for the murder he really wanted to commit, that of the boyfriend of a girl he liked.
He and a buddy, one Aaron Needle, stabbed, strangled and beat Freddy Tello to death with a shotgun, then dismembered the body with a power saw and set it a fire, then put the remains in plastic garbage bags and left in in the garage of a vacant house. Two real-estate agents who were selling the property found the body after they saw blood leaking on the floor.
Sheinbein and Needle ran to New York, and in a moment of "what have I done?" panic, called their parents. Needle's parents told him he had to be a man, come back, and face the music. They sent him a bus ticket, and he returned to Maryland, turned himself in -- and killed himself in jail four months later while awaiting trial.
Sheinbein's father, on the other hand, got the boy's passport, went to New York, and put him on a plane to Israel. Sol Sheinbein was born in old Palestine, which made him a citizen of Israel -- and that technically made the boy Samuel an Israeli as well. And Israel doesn't extradite its citizens to places where there is a death penalty. No, they don't want killers coming there to hide, but the prevailing principle was not putting the life of a Jew in the hands of someone who is not Jewish. Never again.
This turned into an international incident. Congress made noises about cutting off Israel's aid. The Maryland prosecutor took the death penalty off the table; no go. A plea bargain was offered where Sheinbein would be tried in the U.S., but would serve his sentence in Israel if convicted; Maryland turned it down.
They challenged Sheinbein's citizenship; how can he claim to be a citizen if he'd never even been there before? A lower court held he was not. An appeals court held he was not. The Israeli Supreme Court, however, overruled them; he's a citizen, and we're not sending him back. Never again.
So he was indicted in Israel, and a deal was cut where he was sentenced to 24 years, the stiffest sentence Israel ever handed down to a minor. The whole thing led to Israel changing its extradition laws, requiring better proof that an applicant had ties to the country.
Sheinbein's father, for his part, was disbarred in Maryland and the District of Columbia, and faces charges of hindering prosecution if he ever comes back. He has said that because the murder victim, Tello, was Latino, he was afraid his son would be targeted by Latino gang members were he to serve time in a U.S. prison. For that matter, the Latino community in the U.S. was furious that Sheinbein ran and got away.
And that's how things stayed until two months ago ...
... when in February, Sheinbein, on a furlough from prison, tried to buy a gun, and then tried to steal it from the seller, who caught him. A week and a half later, he was being transferred to another jail, and pulled out another gun and shot three guards. He hid in a bathroom, and the prison SWAT team and counterterrorism police held him at bay, until he fired on them and they fired back. He died soon after. No explanation yet of how he got the gun in prison. Details on the story here in Wikipedia, with plenty of links to news stories and supplemental material about it all: Samuel Sheinbein
Replies
This reminds me of the extradition policies of Mexico, which are their right as a sovereign country. If a Mexican citizen who is a non-custodial parent takes a child to Mexico the person won't be extradited. Why? Mexico doesn't recognize this as kidnapping, since they don't believe you can kidnap your own child. If you aren't a Mexican citizen I think they probably will extradite you, or deport you.
A fugitive from U.S. justice for crimes recognized as crimes in Mexico will be extradited, whether or not they are Mexican citizens. They will cheerfully hunt down such criminals and turn them over to U.S. authorities. If, however, they face the death penalty in the U.S. they will have a problem with this. U.S. authorities generally have to give up the idea of the death penalty in order to get them back. I don't know if citizenship matters in this case.
...A few years back , I saw an episode on a L&R series with comics-tangential plot elements - A Manson-style " mad cult leader " was sending messages to his Sinister Followers from within his imprisonment , and one of those followers was a comics artist , who drew " graphic novels " of which we saw a couple of pages taken from briefly .