Saved from extradition to U.S. –after campaign by the Mail
Judges lift threat of trial for Asperger’s ‘computer hacker’ amid suicide fears
FOUR years living in terror that he would be extradited to the US came to an end for alleged computer hacker Lauri Love yesterday.
In a victory for the Daily Mail, judges said it would not be in the interests of justice to send the 33- year- old Asperger’s sufferer to America where it was feared he might kill himself.
Supporters of the vicar’s son, who faced a possible 99-year jail term in the US, cheered the landmark decision at a packed High Court in London.
Outside court Mr Love kissed his girlfriend Sylvia Mann as he celebrated his victory. But last night he said the long extradition battle had plunged him into despair. Mr Love, who as well as Asperger’s has a depressive illness and severe eczema, told Channel 4 News: ‘It’s a feeling of constant, continuous despair that stays at the back of your mind, knowing that one day you may be plucked thousands of miles away and possibly never see your friends or loved ones ever again to serve time in inhumane conditions.
‘That has led to very acute episodes of depression and suicidal thoughts for sometimes days on end. It’s been a very heavy toll on myself and the family for the last four years.’
Mr Love is alleged to have stolen data from US agencies including the Federal Reserve, the US army, the defence department, Nasa and the FBI in online attacks in 2012 and 2013. In 2016 a district judge ruled he could be extradited but Mr Love, from Stradishall, Suffolk, appealed to the High Court.
The Daily Mail campaigned against his extradition, and experts and relatives warned he would commit suicide if imprisoned in the US where there is little provision for those with mental health problems.
Yesterday Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett, the most senior judge in England and Wales, and Mr Justice Ouseley said: ‘ This appeal is allowed and the appellant is discharged and the order for his extradition is quashed.’
In a written ruling they added: ‘We have come to the conclusion Mr Love’s extradition would be oppressive by reason of his physical and mental condition.
‘We accept that the evidence shows that the fact of extradition would bring on severe depression, and that Mr Love would probably be determined to commit suicide, here or in America.’
They said he could still face trial in the UK. The Crown Prosecution Service said it was considering the case.
Meanwhile, the US authorities have 14 days to request that the extradition case is referred to the Supreme Court.
Mr Love said he would accept being tried in the UK where he would face a more lenient sentence of up to 18 months and be better supported if found guilty.
‘This is what we have been fighting for, this has not been a fight for impunity,’ he said.
Telling a press conference he hoped to work in computer
‘Never see your loved ones again’
security in the future, he added: ‘I’m greatly relieved I am no longer facing the prospect of being locked up for potentially the rest of my life in a country I have never visited.
‘If this precedent can avoid someone less fortunate having to go through this ordeal then that would make it worthwhile. This legal struggle has kind of defined my life for the past four years.
‘It is good it has come to a satisfactory and a just conclusion, which expresses the values of compassion and care.’
Later he told Radio 4’s PM programme: ‘It basically means that there isn’t a serious prospect that my life will come to a tragic early end because I would ORIGINAL COPY
have to be in a prison in a country I had never visited for probably decades. Now I can go from having to worry about that mortal peril every day, to worrying about some slightly less mortal peril of being prosecuted in the UK, which compared to the US justice system is a walk in the park.’
His father, the Rev Alexander Love, said: ‘ This is a victory for justice. What makes Great Britain great is that we live in a place with wisdom and compassion.’
Yesterday’s decision will come as a relief to Theresa May who, while home secretary, introduced the law which prevented Mr Love’s trial in the US.
He was spared extradition after the judges upheld the application of the so-called Forum Bar.
The law is intended to prevent extradition where most of the alleged crime has taken place in the UK, and when it would not be in the interests of justice for the accused to be tried abroad.
It was introduced by Mrs May in 2013 after she spared Gary McKinnon, a fellow Asperger’s alleged computer hacker facing a similar situation to that of Mr Love.
Mr Love’s extradition battle was the Forum Bar’s first test in UK law, but the district judge in 2016, Nina Tempia, ruled he could be lawfully extradited. Yesterday the Rev Love added: ‘The other person who should be happy today is our Prime Minister. Because basically the compassion she showed over Gary McKinnon, which was enshrined in law with the Forum Bar, has actually come to fruition.’
Mr Love’s firm of solicitors, Kaim Todner, hailed yesterday’s case as a ‘landmark’ decision which recognised the supremacy of British courts and Mr Love’s vulnerabilities.
The ruling was also welcomed by civil rights campaigners, who have long criticised the unfair extradition treaty which is stacked in the US’s favour.
Campaign group Liberty described as ‘ shameful’ the decision to put Mr Love and his family through the ordeal of the court system.
‘Supremacy of British courts’
OUR Civil Service is the most neutral and even-handed in the world. When it comes to Brexit, there isn’t the tiniest piece of evidence that our mandarins are stacking the cards or displaying any bias.
This is what three highly agitated former heads of the Civil Service assert after the leak last week of a Whitehall report which suggested that, under every imaginable scenario, Britain post-Brexit will be significantly poorer than it would be if it stayed in the EU.
What is striking about the irate response of the three ex- mandarins is that it is anything but balanced and fair-minded. If you were looking for evidence that our senior civil servants are obsessively wedded to the EU, you could do no better than listen to Lords O’Donnell, Turnbull and Butler.
Extreme
According to Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary under Tony Blair and David Cameron, accusations that Whitehall is in any way trying to sabotage Brexit are ‘completely crazy’. He said of Brexiteers: ‘If you are selling snake oil, you don’t like experts testing your products.’ In other words, Leavers are charlatans.
His predecessor, Andrew Turnbull, was even more extreme, accusing Leave supporters of using tactics similar to those employed by the Nazis in the Thirties. He compared their claims about the Civil Service with the myth of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ perpetuated by the German Right years after their country’s defeat in World War I, which heaped the blame for that loss on unpatriotic civilians on the home front. Pretty wild stuff.
Lord Butler — Cabinet Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Blair — contented himself with the observation that ‘rabid Brexiteers’ were seeking to ‘intimidate’ the Civil Service.
These hysterical and offensive rejoinders — not at all normal mandarin- speak — were provoked by what seems to me a perfectly reasonable suggestion, which is that last week’s leaked report was partisan. Tory MP Jacob Rees- Mogg has been berated for accusing officials of ‘fiddling the figures’.
Why is this deemed by some Remainers to be such an outrageous suggestion? Methinks these three former mandarins do protest too much! Both before the June 2016 Referendum on the EU, and also before the Iraq war, there were many examples of the Civil Service being far from neutral.
Everyone can remember how, in the event of people voting to leave the EU, the Treasury foresaw ‘ an immediate and profound economic shock’, which would supposedly drive the UK into an immediate recession, cause unemployment to rise by 500,000 and necessitate an emergency Budget.
A majority of voters ignored the apocalyptic warnings. But none of these dreadful things happened. There has been no economic shock, unemployment has continued to fall and there was no emergency Budget.
Any self-respecting fortuneteller who erred so spectacularly might seek another line of business. Not so the Treasury, a redoubt of anti- Brexit sentiment and the mainspring of last week’s leaked report. Despite having got its predictions so badly wrong, it has dusted off the same old defective crystal ball.
Wouldn’t a degree of humility be in order after so calamitous a mistake? Apparently not. Although last time Whitehall was unable to foresee events a few months ahead with any accuracy, it now feels free to predict the state of the economy ( not good, in its estimation) in 15 years’ time.
This is obviously a nonsense because there are so many unknowable variables. No one sitting at a desk in Whitehall can have any idea how much the economies of the EU will grow — or contract — over this period, or how the rest of the world will fare, or how successfully Britain will rise to new challenges post-Brexit.
In fact, I would submit that anyone who offers such a longterm forecast with any degree of certainty is guilty of fraudulent behaviour. And, of course, the clever mandarins in the Treasury realise perfectly well that it is a bogus exercise.
Have officials fiddled the figures? Let’s just say they have invested them with much more significance than is warranted. And I strongly suspect that this worthless report was leaked by anti- Brexit officials in order to spread doubt and foster misgivings.
Why this silly pretence — to use Gus O’Donnell’s recent phrase — that honesty and objectivity run through the core of senior civil servants ‘like a stick of rock’? I naturally accept that the vast majority of them are scrupulous and decent people.
But they are also partial human beings who (just look at the three gun-toting mandarins) tend overwhelmingly to be anti-Brexit. And yet we are asked to treat this latest dodgy report as though it were a tablet of stone discovered by Moses on Mount Sinai.
There were, in truth, lots of instances of civil servants not being neutral in the run-up to the Iraq War. The Blair Government deceived the British people in various ways, but it could not have done so without the co- operation of senior civil servants.
Pressure
The dossier of September 2002, making the case for the invasion of Iraq, may have been strengthened (or ‘sexed up’) at the behest of Tony Blair and his sidekick Alistair Campbell, but this happened with the assistance of senior civil servants, including John Scarlett, then head of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Equally, when Campbell issued the duplicitous ‘dodgy dossier’ in February 2003 — it rehashed long-published material by an Iraqi dissident which it passed off as being new and fresh — he had to rely on the collaboration of civil servants. Were they being neutral and impartial? I think not.
Then there was the legal advice of Lord Goldsmith, the Labour Attorney- General, before the war. At first he deemed it illegal but then, after apparent pressure from Tony Blair, changed his mind. Senior civil servants were undoubtedly involved in what looks like a deception.
To her eternal credit one of them, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned as a senior Foreign Office lawyer on the eve of the invasion, believing it to be illegal. On the other hand, her immediate boss, Sir Michael Wood, did not admit until seven years later that he had thought military action was unlawful. Why didn’t he say so at the time?
I’m afraid there’s plenty of evidence of senior civil servants being manipulated, or leant on, or willingly and knowingly colluding with ministers and other officials before the Iraq War. Such behaviour does not accord with Lord O’Donnell’s strange conception of all officials having honesty and objectivity running through them ‘like a stick of rock’.
Prejudices
By the way, it is worth mentioning the name of the head of the Civil Service before and during the Iraq War, since he should surely assume some responsibility for the shenanigans that went on. It was none other than Lord Turnbull, who now disgracefully compares some Brexiteers to Nazis.
I’m happy to accept that our Civil Service remains one of the most incorruptible in the world and, for all its faults, is reasonably competent. But it is simply childish to pretend that its undeniable prejudices on Brexit and other issues are somehow beside the point.
If you don’t believe me, listen to Lord Kerslake, another former head of the Civil Service, who veered away from the party line last year in criticising the Treasury’s poor record at forecasting. He warned of ‘the specific need to re-establish the department’s [i.e. the Treasury’s] credibility in terms of the impartiality of its advice’.
With Bob Kerslake — whose own stick of rock has ‘Whitehall loyalist’ stamped into it — accepting that the Treasury has lost the plot, why should the rest of us take its forecasts with any seriousness?
No, it can’t be trusted. The next time Whitehall leaks an anti-Brexit report, my advice to Leavers and sensible Remainers alike is not to take a blind bit of notice, and throw the damned thing unceremoniously into the bin.