Court Revokes Governors’ Right to Deny Extradition

The Supreme Court, overturning a Civil War-era decision, ruled Tuesday that governors must abide by federal court orders calling for the extradition of an accused criminal.

For more than 125 years, state governors have had the authority to ignore such extradition orders, as former California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. did in the case of Indian activist Dennis Banks.

But in revoking an 1861 Supreme Court decision, the justices said in a unanimous opinion that extradition orders “afford no discretion” to governors.

The ruling sent an Iowa man back to Puerto Rico, where he is wanted for vehicular homicide.

The decision was the second this month to tighten the extradition procedures between the states. The high court said last week that state courts cannot dismiss valid extradition from other states.

Evolving System

Justice Thurgood Marshall, writing for the court, said Tuesday’s ruling shows that the constitutional system must evolve over time.

The 1861 extradition decision was “a product of another time,” he said. Yet it has “stood while the world of which it was a part has passed away.”

In February, 1861, with the union about to split, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s governor could not be compelled to return a free black man to Kentucky for trial on charges of aiding an escaped slave.

“If it seemed clear to the court in 1861, facing the looming shadow of a Civil War,” that the federal government had no authority to impose its will upon a state, “basic constitutional principles now point as clearly the other way,” Marshall wrote. The Civil War itself overturned the notion that states are sovereign, he said.

The opinion by Marshall, the court’s only black member, directly rejected an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who, in the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, described Negro slaves as “an article of property” and members of “an inferior order.”

Governors’ use of their power of refusal on extradition requests has been rare over the years but controversial.

In the late 1970s, when Brown refused extradition orders from South Dakota for Banks to be returned for sentencing on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, a torrent of criticism ensued.

Tuesday, prosecutors in Illinois immediately renewed their bid to extradite a Utah businessman to face murder charges in a cyanide poisoning case. Two Utah governors have refused to honor Illinois’ extradition requests.

In the case before the Supreme Court, Iowa Gov. Terry E. Branstad and his predecessor, Robert Ray, had refused to honor an extradition request from Puerto Rico in 1981 charging Ronald Calder of Iowa with homicide after he deliberately ran over a Puerto Rican couple with his automobile.

Fight in Parking Lot

Calder said the incident arose over a fight in a parking lot and that as a “white American man” he could not get a fair trial in Puerto Rico. Ray said he would not return Calder until Puerto Rico reduced the charge to a “more realistic” one.

A federal district court and appeals court also rejected Puerto Rico’s request, citing the 1861 decision.

The high court also dismissed an assertion by Iowa attorneys that Puerto Rico did not have the same extradition authority because it is not a state.

“The (Extradition) Act requires rendition of fugitives at the request of a demanding ‘territory,’ as well as state,” Marshall said in the case (Puerto Rico vs. Branstad, 85-2116).