An Algerian-born Irish citizen, Ali Charaf Damache, will not be extradited to the United States to stand trial for allegedly conspiring to use online chat rooms to recruit American women into a potential terrorist cell. The reason the high court in Ireland has given is not whether or not Mr. Damache is guilty or innocent, it's because the United States judicial system and more specifically their "supermax" solitary-confinement prison system amounts to
cruel and inhumane punishment:
In her judgement, Ms Justice Donnelly said there was no meaningful judicial review available in the US of the conditions of detention and the necessity for same.
Mr Damache’s main complaint was in relation to the allegedly inhuman conditions he would be detained in if he was extradited. The judge decided that “the institutionalisation of solitary confinement with its routine isolation from meaningful contact and communication with staff and other inmates, for a prolonged pre-determined period of at least 18 months and continuing almost certainly for many years, amounts to a breach of the constitutional requirement to protect persons from inhuman and degrading treatment and to respect the dignity of the human being.”
[bold my emphasis]
What the Irish judge is referring to is the United States' supermax prison in Colorado:
Opened in 1994, the Colorado supermax prison is the toughest and most controversial correctional facility in the U.S. federal system.
It is dubbed the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," and has housed some of the nation's most notorious prisoners, including Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; and Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber. No one has ever escaped.
Food is delivered through a slit in the cell door. Family visits are banned, conversations with others are restricted, and rarely, if ever, do inmates glimpse a tree or a bird through a window. They spend days and nights alone, their feet on concrete, their thoughts to themselves.
It is used by lawyers during capital sentencing hearings as a reason not to employ the death penalty—as the supermax prison is worse than death. This is the prison Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will spend the rest of his days in as punishment for the Boston Marathon bombings.
Kenneth Fulton, unit manager at the prison, offered a rare glimpse of supermax when he told the Irish court in legal documents that the prison houses less than one-quarter of 1% of all the federal inmates in the U.S.
Christopher Synsvoll, supervisory attorney at the penitentiary, said that as of August 2014, 407 inmates were kept there — out of the total 207,504 in the federal system.
Damache is free now, having served three years in prison for an unrelated terror-threat charge in Ireland. He sounds like a real piece of work. He is probably guilty of the charges that the U.S. want to imprison him for. Unfortunately, our penal system is so far through the looking glass at this point that countries don't feel like getting any of our morality on their shoes.
