Will law chief now make him stand trial in a British court?
GARY McKinnon’s fate now rests in the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions, who will decide if he can be charged with computer hacking in the UK.
Keir Starmer provoked fury when he ruled in 2009 that the Asperger’s sufferer could not be placed on trial in Britain – despite the fact that his alleged offences originated from the bedroom of his north London flat.
The DPP said there was ‘ insufficient evidence’, even though Mr McKinnon admitted hacking into Nasa and Pentagon computers.
If he had agreed to a British trial, the extradition proceedings would have been halted immediately and Mr McKinnon would have faced justice at home three years ago.
Mr Starmer’s critics claimed he did not wish to upset the Americans, who were determined to drag the hacker across the Atlantic for having exposed disturbing weaknesses in their cyber-security systems.
Following Theresa May’s dramatic intervention yesterday, the ball is back in Mr Starmer’s court.
He no longer has to consider which is the best place to put Mr McKinnon on trial, since the US is no longer an option. Instead, he must analyse whether a UK prosecution is likely to succeed, most probably under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. The maximum sentence would be five years. On every one of the 97 occasions on which Mr McKinnon is alleged to have hacked into military computers, he was at his Wood Green flat, using only a modem and a primitive computer borrowed from his then girlfriend’s aunt.
US authorities allege he caused £500,000 damage to their computers, a sum he fiercely disputes.
In interviews in 2002, the Metropolitan Police clearly told Mr McKinnon there was sufficient evidence for a prosecution and he provided them with a detailed written confession.
Most of the evidence against him is held in the US. However, it is understood that British police are still confident they could bring a case against him.
Any prosecution would almost certainly require the co-operation of the US authorities, who are deeply unhappy at yesterday’s decision.
However, the alternative would be for them to refuse to provide evidence – unlikely considering how doggedly they have pursued the hacker over the past decade.
A spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service said: ‘We will carefully consider Gary McKinnon’s case and come to a decision as soon as possible.’