Courts Back Asylum, but IRA ‘Hero’ Is Target of U.S. Deportation Drive

When Joe Doherty broke out of a maximum-security prison in Northern Ireland 7 years ago, the Irish Republican Army’s underground of safe houses and sympathizers sent him to this working-class, Irish-American suburb of New York.

Doherty and three others had been convicted of killing a British army officer in a 1980 shooting.

In Kearny, he lived with an American girlfriend, worked in construction and took a part-time job at Clancy’s Bar in Manhattan.

“It was sort of like being normal, for once . . . having a job and knowing you’re not going to get assassinated or stopped in the street because of your religion,” Doherty said in a recent interview at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

On June 28, 1983, FBI agents walked into Clancy’s, ordered a round of beers and took Doherty into custody again.

Since then, the case has grown to involve the White House, the Justice Department, civil rights activists and leaders of Britain and Ireland.

Political Asylum Sought

Doherty doesn’t deny that he was involved in the killing. He says it was a political act, and that he deserves political asylum in the United States.

The Justice Department regards Doherty as a terrorist and says he should be deported.

“The question of who gets political asylum and who is a refugee should be based on the law, on facts and on circumstances,” Mary Pike, Doherty’s lawyer, said, “but the question really depends on which government you’re fleeing. If it’s a government with which the Reagan Administration wants to remain friendly, then you can’t get asylum.”

“If I was a Cuban,” said Doherty, “there’s no way I would be deported.”

Doherty, a bachelor, has spent most of his 33 years in hiding or in prison. He joined the IRA in 1969, the year British troops were sent in to quell violence between Protestants and Catholics.

“I’d watched my father live his life as a second-class citizen, and tell me to learn a trade and then emigrate,” said Doherty. “I didn’t want to tell my son at 17 that he had to go to Canada to find a job because of his religion.”

Waiting in Prison

While lawyers debate his case, Doherty has spent five years in a 12-by-6-foot cell at the federal prison in New York.

“I see this case as a complete rejection of the Constitution by the government,” Paul O’Dwyer, a civil liberties attorney in New York, said. “There is no other prisoner I know of who has been held for such a protracted period of time having committed no crime in the United States.”

Tom Moseley, a former Justice Department attorney who handled the Doherty case, said the bottom line is that Doherty is a terrorist who killed someone.

“We felt he should have been extradited to (Britain) on the grounds of murder and assault,” said Moseley, now in private practice in Morristown.

Some who sympathize with the IRA’s goal of uniting the Republic of Ireland with the six counties of Northern Ireland consider Doherty a folk hero. In fact, the Justice Department went to court last year to stop Philadelphians from naming Doherty honorary grand marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

“Free Joe Doherty” graffiti adorn walls and sidewalks all over New York City. At a New Jersey bar not far from where Doherty lived, his picture is hung next to one of Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoner who starved in a British prison during a 1981 hunger strike.

Among Doherty’s supporters are New York’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Cardinal John O’Connor, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who visited Doherty in prison in July.

Other influential forces are fighting for Doherty’s extradition. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher raised the issue with President Reagan during a 1986 visit to Washington. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) has described Doherty as “an Irish Ghengis Khan.” It was Lugar who led the successful fight to exclude the political-exception clause from the century-old U.S.-British extradition treaty when it was renegotiated in 1986.

Britain filed a formal request for Doherty’s return in 1983. It was denied in December, 1984, by U.S. District Judge John E. Sprizzo in Brooklyn, who ruled that Doherty’s crime was a political act that qualified him for political asylum.

The government appealed, and U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight also decided in Doherty’s favor. In a further government appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York also found for Doherty.

Then, having failed to extradite Doherty, the Justice Department began trying to deport him.

Because the law says deportees may choose where they are sent, Doherty chose the independent Republic of Ireland. His decision was upheld by immigration Judge Howard I. Cohen in 1986.

“If I was sent back to Ireland, I would be arrested and put in jail,” Doherty said, “but hopefully, it would be a humane place and I would get a fair hearing, not like in the north.”

The Administration, this time through the Immigration and Naturalization Service, appealed Cohen’s order and again lost. Two more appeals and two more government defeats followed. The latest ruling came Nov. 14.

Meanwhile, the Republic of Ireland, under pressure from London and Washington, in December, 1987, ratified the European Convention on Terrorism, which calls for mandatory extradition of those deemed terrorists. That eliminated Doherty’s Irish option.

Today, Doherty is pinning his hopes on winning asylum, though after 5 1/2 years of court battles, he is not optimistic.

“I go to court. I win,” he said. “But here I am.”