Meese Orders IRA Fugitive Sent to Britain

Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III today ordered the deportation to Britain of an Irish Republican Army fugitive convicted of murdering a British soldier.

The fugitive, Joseph Patrick Thomas Doherty, was found guilty in 1981 by a British court in Belfast, Northern Ireland, of machine-gunning to death a soldier during an ambush of a British army convoy.

Meese, who has final authority over immigration cases, overturned a decision by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals that granted Doherty’s request to deport him not to Britain but to Ireland.

The order means Doherty must be sent to Britain if he is deported. But the appeals board is still considering Doherty’s separate request for political asylum in the United States.

Escaped From Jail

The 35-year-old Doherty, who was sentenced to life in prison, escaped from a Belfast jail in 1981 and fled to the United States using false documents the following year.

He was arrested in 1983 at Clancy’s Bar in New York, where he was working as a bartender. Doherty has been held in jail without bail since then while the U.S. government seeks to deport him.

“I disapprove the (appeal board’s) decision and conclude that it would be prejudicial to the interests of the United States for (Doherty) to be deported to Ireland and that he should be deported instead to the United Kingdom,” Meese said.

“It is the policy of the United States that those acts of violence against a democratic state should receive prompt and lawful punishment,” he said in his 11-page ruling.

Terrorism Battle Cited

Meese cited a State Department letter warning that the decision to deport Doherty to Ireland would harm U.S. relations with Britain and could undermine British cooperation against terrorism.

The U.S. government has waged a long legal battle to extradite Doherty, but it suffered a key setback in 1984 when a federal judge in New York ruled against sending him to Britain on the ground that his crimes were politically motivated.

The government still seeks to deport Doherty because he entered the United States illegally.

If deported, Doherty would be the second IRA member to be sent to Britain. In 1986, accused IRA bomber William Quinn was extradited to Britain to stand trial on charges of murdering an off-duty London police constable while trying to flee from a clandestine IRA bomb factory.