[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 6]
[House]
[Pages 8008-8009]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   A STRANGE REWARD FOR HEROIC ACTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor as I have so many 
times in the past to address an issue dealing with our extradition 
policy.
  Mr. Speaker, a gentleman by the name of Duane Chapman, a bounty 
hunter that goes by the name of ``Dog,'' faces the strangest of rewards 
for heroic action.
  In 2003, Mr. Chapman received a tip regarding the whereabouts of a 
millionaire by the name of Andrew Luster. Mr. Luster was a convicted 
felon who had fled as an escapee from the California Department of 
Corrections 6 months earlier by jumping $1 million bail on charges that 
he drugged and raped three women. He was also on the FBI's Most Wanted 
List, convicted and sentenced to a term of 124 years of imprisonment in 
absentia for 86 counts of rape, drug and weapons offenses.
  Mr. Chapman went to Mexico to act on this tip and was accompanied by 
a local Mexican police officer. He was also in communications with U.S. 
officials, who were aware of his activities.
  Much to his credit, Mr. Chapman successfully located Mr. Luster and 
apprehended him. However, on the way to the jail to book Mr. Luster, 
Chapman's police escort disappeared, strangely. As a result, Mr. 
Chapman was detained for several days on the relatively minor charge of 
deprivation of freedom and conspiracy. Mr. Chapman then returned to the 
U.S. after posting bail.
  Thanks to Dog, a serial rapist is now rightly serving a 124-year 
sentence and the situation seemed to have worked out for the best. But 
now, years after the fact, it seems that the Mexican Government is 
intent on extraditing and prosecuting Mr. Chapman. Incredibly, our 
State Department seems to have no problem being complicit in these 
proceedings.
  I have written the Department of Justice at least once and the 
Department of State several times just asking them to justify what they 
have done. I wanted to figure out exactly what their

[[Page 8009]]

reasoning is for handling this specific case in this way.
  There are a lot of legitimate questions. For instance, how is it 
possible that the Department of Justice would decide to use taxpayer 
resources to send U.S. Marshals to Hawaii to take Mr. Chapman into 
custody?

                              {time}  2130

  This is an administration that routinely tells Congress that they 
cannot secure our borders and immigration system due to lack of 
resources. We are told that the U.S. Attorney's Office in the border 
States are simply overwhelmed with cases and cannot prosecute all of 
the violations, even very serious ones. We are told that ICE can't 
possibly tackle the task of deporting illegal aliens from the interior 
of our Nation. We are apparently supposed to accept the presence of 
roughly 100,000 criminal aliens inside our borders, a number that is 
growing every year, while the U.S. Marshals track down a successful 
bounty hunter instead.
  After formally apprehending Mr. Chapman and putting him into a bevy 
of new legal proceedings, the question of extradition is raised. Though 
my observations of our extradition treaty with Mexico indicate that it 
is not absolutely binding, conventional wisdom has seemed to assume 
that the treaty between the U.S. and Mexico requires Chapman's 
extradition. But it is just this, conventional wisdom. It is not part 
of the treaty, apparently.
  I am not the only one to question whether extradition ought to 
proceed. One recent news story reported that although the U.S. and 
Mexico informally agreed to recognize trans-border captures by bounty 
hunters as extraditable offenses, this provision was never fully 
incorporated into the extradition treaty. The report indicates that 
this ``informal'' addition to the treaty came after bounty hunters 
captured a gentleman by the name of Humberto Alvarez-Machain, a Mexican 
physician implicated in the torture and execution of a U.S. Drug 
Enforcement Agent. Alvarez-Machain maintained that his capture violated 
the U.S.-Mexico extradition treaty.
  The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Alvarez-Machain's claim in 1992. In 
the decision, Justice Rehnquist wrote that the treaty ``says nothing 
about the obligations of the United States and Mexico to refrain from 
forcible abductions of people from the territory of the other nation, 
or the consequences under the treaty if such an abduction occurs.'' 
That is his quote.
  Mexico's Government was upset by the decision which gave rise to its 
``informal'' addition to the treaty. Alan Kreczko, then deputy legal 
adviser to the Secretary of State, then James Baker, said in 
congressional testimony that the U.S. and Mexican governments had 
exchanged letters recognizing that trans-border abductions by so-called 
bounty hunters and other private individuals would be considered 
extraditable offenses by both nations.
  This international dispute should have remained amicably resolved by 
virtue of the fact that justice has clearly been served in the case of 
``Dog'' Chapman. But now that these events have been set in motion 
anew, the best resolution in which we can hope for would come from the 
Mexican government and judiciary when they dismiss the charges pending 
against the Chapmans and also to withdraw their request for 
extradition.
  Let's just say that I am not over optimistic for this stand by 
Secretary Rice to refuse extradition to Mr. Chapman, and I hope this 
good deed does not go unpunished.

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