Scot to face gun rap
Murder suspect loses 14-year US battle
A SCOTS murder suspect is to be extradited to the US to face trial after losing a 14-year legal battle.
Phillip Harkins, 38, is wanted for the gun murder of Joshua Hayes in a robbery in Florida in 1999.
He returned to Scotland in 2002 while on bail and US authorities first requested his extradition the following year.
Yesterday, Harkins, originally from Greenock, had his final appeal extradition rejected by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
His lawyers argued extradition would amount to inhuman or degrading treatment and breached his right to a fair trial.
They said if convicted in Florida, he would face a whole-life prison sentence without the possibility of parole. But the court declared Harkins’s complaints inadmissible and ruled an interim measure in place to stay his extradition should be lifted.
The extradition battle is the longest in British legal history.
Harkins, who moved to the US with his family when he was 14, has always denied any involvement in the killing of Hayes. The 22-yearagainst old was shot in the head during a drug-related attempted robbery in Jacksonville.
After Harkins’s return to Scotland, he was jailed for five years in 2003 for dangerous driving after he killed a 62-year-old woman in a road crash in Greenock.
It was after that sentence that the US authorities began the process of extraditing him.