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Punish the obsessive

Last updated on 4 Oct 2017

John Wesley wrote, commenting on Acts 5:28: “They make laws and interdicts at their pleasure, which those who obey God cannot but break; and then take occasion thereby to censure and punish the innocent, as guilty.” It matters not that he was talking about the Sanhedrin; any authority will do as well.

In the period after 9/11, a lot of bad law was made. One of these was in the United Kingdom, where they basically signed their citizens over to United States justice if they were indicted in some crime there that could be called “terrorist”, a catchall term that means “anything the authorities do not like, but can’t prosecute under civil law”. Laws and interdicts at their pleasure, indeed.

Gary McKinnon is a Scot who lives in London, who has Asperger’s – a form of “autism spectrum disorder” that leads to compulsive behaviours and obsessions without the individual being able to prevent it. He hacked into a number of US military computers to find evidence of UFOs, which he was convinced the government was hiding. In the process he did what the US government claims was $770,000 worth of damage.

He has now lost his last appeal against extradition, and faces life in Guantanamo, he fears, although any US prison will be equally dehumanizing for an Asperger’s sufferer. He is reportedly thinking of committing suicide. He asserts he did no damage and only access unsecured machines.

He will not get a fair trial in the US, which does not recognise this disorder as a defence.

What are the reasons for prosecuting him? There are three and only three reasons for punishment.

  1. To reform the offender (so called rehabilitation, which is not done these days)

  2. To deter others (as the fellow is an Aspie, he was unlikely to have been deterred by the already published sanctions, as Aspies do not think that way), and

  3. Revenge. This, it seems is the sole motivation for the American legal system these days.

The discussion at Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog is enlightening. Many of the commenters want to see this fellow, who nobody thinks had malign intentions, sent to prison for life. One even said, “If he commits suicide, so be it”. Is this what American law has come to? Punishment at any cost? Revenge against the innocent?

I am mostly disappointed at the UK legal system. He should not have been extradited to a system that is so much harsher than his own, particularly as he was physically in his own country at the time of the offence. Australia will not, for example, extradite its citizens to other countries that have the death penalty, preferring to charge them at home. This is effectively a death sentence to this guy, as anyone who knows or has Aspies in the family understands. It’s not a fashionable defence like the Twinky defence (which, be it noted, did work in the US). It’s a medical diagnosis that will be ignored by the American jury and judge.

Just so long as that Calvinist sense of responsibility is maintained, eh? Oh, and so long as the damage from 9/11 to the rule of law is not rolled back.

22 Comments

  1. jeff jeff

    $770k? For downloading a picture or two that might vaguely support his belief in UFO’s? If he wouldn’t have been caught, how much damage would have been done? And he actually helped them locate defects in their security – how much is that worth?

    I’m also disappointed in the UK. The issue for me is that there was no real malicious intent here – no intent to destroy anything. Just curiosity, obsessive or not. He does not deserve this punishment.

  2. Susan Silberstein Susan Silberstein

    I’ve been thinking about the concept of punishment. You would be surprised, or perhaps not, how often self-identified progressives, when discussing the appropriate penalty for wrong doers, suggest that rape in prison should be part of it. The latest example was a couple of days ago at Pharyngula.

    If it wasn’t so horrific, it would be amusing. Here was an [apparent] atheist advocating something something akin to an eye for an eye.

    • I emphatically agree with you (apart from the suggestion that being an atheist might be expected to have some bearing on one’s opinion either way).

      I don’t know how closely reality correlates to rumour as to the frequency of violence in prisons (I get the impression it depends a lot on which prison), but I believe very strongly that society has a duty to do what it takes (e.g. spending lots of tax dollars on prison security) to prevent violence inflicted by one prisoner on another.

      (Politicians take note: agreeing with me on this issue is an excellent way to secure my vote.)

  3. john monfries john monfries

    Yes, but they weren’t real atheists.

    [insert fallacy here]

    Yes, it was rather horrible; what I hadn’t picked up was that the man in question has Aspergers. That explains quite a lot.

    I suppose a big disappointment, but probably not a surprise, is that neither Obama in the US, nor Rudd in Oz (nor Brown for that matter) have taken any real steps to restore civil rights after their trashing in the terrorism-soaked panic post-2001.

    The latest event in Australia is the arrests in Melbourne. Rudd at least made a warning about not blaming any particular group, but this was far too weak (forget the exact words).

    He should have gone much stronger on that.

  4. Chris' Wills Chris' Wills

    The 770,000 in damages just happened to be enough to make it serious enough.

    Strange that.

    Another thing to make me ashamed of being British, our leaders have sold our souls to a foreign power and gained naught in return, apart from Bliar who has made a bob or two.

    Hopefully we’ll elect leaders who’ll return the civil liberties and freedoms stolen from us in the name of securuty, though I doubt it.
    Obama seems to be happy enough to continue the deceits and abuse of power, rhetoric without substance. The UK liebor party is in its death throws (I hope) and content to continue stealing from the taxpayers. Aus does seem a little better, though that may just be me seeing it through the mists of distance.

  5. rajay rajay

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4715612.stm
    When Britain’s hi-tech crime unit finally came for him 2002, Mr McKinnon was not surprised. He told the BBC: “I think I almost wanted to be caught, because it was ruining me. I had this classic thing of wanting to be caught so there would be an end to it.”

    He thought he would be tried in Britain, and that he might get, at the most, three to four years in prison.

    so at least he knew the consequences of his actions.
    second, did he not appeal in European Court of Human Rights also?

    third, you are declaring him innocent on intentions. what about his actions?

  6. Jeb Jeb

    He should not be being sent to the States. The extradition law is unbalanced and he will not get a fair trial. His guilt or innocence is irelevant given these circumstances.

    America has also been interfering in our own legal system further of late issuing threats if courts disclose details of alleged acts of torture.
    Thus undermining our legal systems right to investigate and disclose information to the public.

    The definition of what a terrorist is expanding now and clearly covers enviromental protesters among others.

    You attend an anti B.N.P demonstration that the local police have declared illegal. Have a guess what department is going to take an intrest in you and what you are going to be officialy classified as?

    The obsessive and insane administrative classification of the surveilance state. The political protester is now the potential terror suspect and termed as such within the legal system.

  7. I find this decision by a British court and the failure of the British Government to intervene deeply depressing and highly embarrassing; it makes me ashamed of the fact that I am a British citizen.

  8. MPL MPL

    “Is this what American law has come to? Punishment at any cost? Revenge against the innocent?”

    Yes.

    Resisting the feelings of revenge and power in the justice system is like resisting gravity—you can do it (Cf. airplanes, rockets, skyscrapers), but it requires a plan, discipline, motivation.

    When people are offended, hurt, frightened, they want to rewrite the laws into a big brother who can beat someone up for them. The thought that they might be creating an unaccountable, dangerous legal behemoth does not occur to them—surely my monster won’t hurt me!

  9. Ian H Spedding, FCD Ian H Spedding, FCD

    The legal systems of both countries are far from perfect but I detect a whiff of chauvinism in some of the comments. The United States has had a written constitution since 1787, the Bill of Rights being added in 1791, both of which have been denied to Her Majesty’s subjects. Is there any doubt that attempts to restrict the right to freedom of expression in the UK would have met much stiffer resistance if there had been a long-standing and accessible statutory guarantee of such a right and the British people as a whole were accustomed to standing on that right regardless of the power of those sought to undermine it.

    And any system of justice must assume that people can be held responsible for their actions if they are of sound mind. The two questions to be answered about Gary McKinnon are first, did he know that what he was doing was illegal at the time and could he have acted otherwise if he had chosen? If the answer to both questions is ‘yes’ then he should stand trial.

    The offence was committed against US property in the United States so that is where he should be tried. If an American hacker had broken into top-secret British computer systems is there any doubt that the British authorities would have been formally demanding his extradition. And you can imagine the rabid anti-Americanism that would have surfaced in the British tabloid press if the US government resisted the application.

    As for his prospects of a fair trial in the American courts, in high-profile cases there is usually no shortage of lawyers keen to enhance their reputations by winning them so we could expect him to be well-defended.

    • John Wilkins John Wilkins

      Ian, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention over the past, say, eight years, but the US no longer has much of a reputation for legal niceties when it comes to things that are seen politically as “national security” issues. I fully expect this fool to go to prison for 30 years without parole.

      And the crime, not the effects of the crime, was perpetrated on British soil. I would expect that any US Citizen charged with the same offence would be tried on US soil if that is where they committed it. The UK government has badly let down its citizens’ rights (a major shift the UK has been undergoing for a few decades now, since the draconian laws of the 1970s WRT Northern Ireland) in order to appease the 800lb gorilla across the pond.

      Post script: Note that the law under which he is being extradited was after the offense. This, too, is bad law. One should not be charged or processed under laws that did not apply at the time of the offense.

      • MPL MPL

        Come now, let’s be fair. We Americans don’t have much of a reputation for legal niceties for any crimes these days, not just “national security” ones.

      • Ian H Spedding, FCD Ian H Spedding, FCD

        I have no intention of defending the Bush administration for their cavalier treatment of constitutional rights or bending the law as far as they could, possibly even breaking it. But they were and are not the entirety of the US legal system. What about the Dover trial? Was that American justice at its best or worst?

        As for jurisdiction, let’s try a little thought experiment. A man plans to kill another in the US but arranges what he hopes will be the best possible alibi by being in another country at the time the murder is committed. From London, he arranges to have a bomb planted where knows his victim will be in the near future and then, at the appropriate time, detonates it by remote control from across the Atlantic. Was the offense committed in the UK or the US and, hence, where should it be tried?

        I entirely agree that ex post facto law is a bad thing., the Nuremberg trials notwithstanding. It would be unjust to try someone for having committed an offense that was not a crime at the time. Whether or not the Extradition Act of 2003 is inequitable, an extradition treaty is not the same thing as penal law. It does not specify a punishable offense, it only enables the transfer of those accused of offenses from one country to another.

      • John Wilkins John Wilkins

        Ian, I know you want to defend your country’s legal system, and in principle and occasionally practice there is a lot worth defending. But this idiot has been charged with a national security breach. The US does not behave rationally when such terms are thrown around, and the prisons have a reputation for being worse than nearly all third world prisons, except that there is at least food provided.

        He looked for UFO material. He’s going to prison for a very long time, no matter what you say. He doesn’t deserve that, nor to be raped or killed in prison. [For that matter, easily half the prisoners there now do not deserve that, but let’s talk about the idiot drug laws some other time. He didn’t plant bombs. Nobody died or was placed in jeopardy by his actions (while if there were sensitive files on the systems he hacked, the administrators of those machines did do so). And he is obsessive compulsive for certain kinds of behaviours. But he’s going to prison for several years minimum, away from his family and friends. It’s a death sentence.

        I am particularly concerned about this because we had a citizen in Guantanamo who actually did train with the Taliban, but who never undertook any actions against the west, and who broke no laws at the time. He was in solitary confinement for five years, never charged or prosecuted, and eventually was released under draconian restrictions. Our government failed to protect him from American injustice. As the father of an Apsie, I am most concerned for this guy; as an Australian I am still outraged. Both were fucking idiots. Neither deserve what came to them or is coming for McKinnon. And the governments of both nations should be imprisoned for failure to provide their duty of care.

  10. There seems to be a misunderstanding here. The US legal system isn’t really the problem, so much as the muscular executive directives that were hammered through by the previous admin in order to circumnavigate their own judiciary. The entire point of Guantanamo Bay was to prevent “terrorists” from having the luxury of fair trial through the US legal system. In fairness to the latter, the judiciary has flexed its muscles to try and challenge this on legal, as well as simply philosophical grounds. They’ve had a few victories, too, and should get more now that the old boys are out of office.

    Incidentally, Britain has long held the powers that the US only recently (and likely temporarily) bequeathed to its own executive inre overriding law. British security forces have far more freedom to act within the confines of their own borders than their US counterparts (again, that’s why the Bush admin had to keep everything outside the reach of US law). I mean, lets not get into British activity in Ireland, both with its legal jurisdiction in the north (not that we gave a shit) as well as the south.

    As to whether Mr. MacKinnon get’s a fair trial, it’s hard to say until we know by whom he is to be tried. If he really is to be tried as a “terrorist”, which actually sounds like a load of bollocks, then it would be a military tribunal, and probably not a fair one. However, the way it sounds, it’s a standard extradition for a “crime” being treated as if it was committed on US soil, which would be outside of the jurisdiction of Bush et al’s bizarre little legal satellite, in which case he will get a much better hearing than the fellows stuck in Cuba.

    As for his Aspergers not being taken into account, that’s simply bullshit. It will certainly be a point for the prosecution that it took 42 yrs for MacKinnon to be given this diagnosis (after the crime), but if it is considered a genuine one it will certainly be used by the defence as a mitigating factor. Bear in mind, this is the country that got OJ Simpson off the hook; if Gary has access to whatever defence team he can buy (and judging by his support, he won’t be short of funds), he’s going to have a much better shout in the US than a foreign national accused of espionage would have in Britain. Hell, they just shoot you in the streets back home for that kind of thing back home, and then slap some whitewash on it and ask everyone to look the other way.

    • John Wilkins John Wilkins

      The diagnosis of Aspergers only became available in the last ten years. Moreover, only teenagers and young children have been diagnosed – adults with that condition are not retroactively sought out and diagnosed by the medical authorities. Moreover, there is still a certain kind of medico who really thinks, deep down, that these people are actually just badly behaved and are faking it.

      OJ got off because he bought the best performers. If that is an example of American justice, then you really had better think again.

      But I agree that the UK is draconian in its antiterror laws. So, now, is Australia. These laws must be struck off the books as soon as possible. Moreover, the UK has given up all rights to privacy and freedom of speech, which is a real shame. It isn’t, however, because of the lack of a written constitution, as constitutional democracies elsewhere have managed to protect these rights, and constitutions do not protect rights in many countries that have them. It is a political failure, and one that the people actively need to resolve soon, if they aren’t to fall back into eighteenth century tyrannies.

  11. Further reading reveals:
    “In 2003 McKinnon rejected a written plea offer that would have given him six months to a year in a U.S. low security prison, followed by a transfer back to the UK for parole six months later… Through a quirk of the metric system, this becomes 60 years, 70 years, 80 years and a life sentence in the British press. “

    From Wired.com.

    I don’t miss British tabloids. I mean, they have the Enquirer over here, but even the most ignorant inbred hillbilly to have ever eaten his own mother in the swamps of Louisiana knows not to take that sort of claptrap seriously. If only the same could be said for the average reader of the Daily Mail.

    • John Wilkins John Wilkins

      Sure. McKinnon acts stupidly. If you know any Aspies with idee fixes, you will recognise this is a a feature of the condition.

      And America is the source of the single wisest thing ever said about the media, by a journalist and publisher named Mark Twain (well, Samuel Clemens, but you know who I’m talking about):

      “I wouldn’t hang a dog on a newspaper report.”

      • Fair point on the Aspergers diagnosis, and I’m sure that will be raised by his defence.

        I’m not sure McKinnon was at fault, nor his family for that matter, but his British legal advisors need to do some explaining as to why they didn’t strongly advise him to take the slap on the wrist and call it a day.

        “OJ got off because he bought the best performers. If that is an example of American justice, then you really had better think again.”

        If you’re referring to the fact that money talks in terms of receiving the full benefit of the US criminal justice system, I agree. Legal aid is certainly more progressive in the UK. But that specific case was actually a good example the legal part of the system working well, imho; i.e. protecting the defendent (who should always have the befit of the doubt) from prosecution on the basis of improper police and forensic procedure, hearsay, and contradictory witness evidence. I honestly think OJ was as guilty as all hell, but there’s no doubt that the case against him was a mess.

        The believe of McKinnon’s supporters, then, that he will face a system biased towards the prosecution’s case is thus unwarranted, imho.

  12. Jeb Jeb

    I don’t think its a misunderstanding the extradition treaty is unbalanced, full stop. The level of evidence required is not the same for both nations.

    My place of work for an enviromental agency was phone tapped throughout the 80’s by our security services, Britian certainly can’t take the moral high ground in these areas. Its track record is appalling.

    But the fact remains the same, its a treaty not in the intrests of U.K citizens, if the treaty was applied equaly to U.S and U.K citizens there would be no problem.

    Its not equal and as a result it is creating problems. If the position was reversed I suspect many people in the U.S. would feel as strongly about the situation as many in the U.K do.

    Its not just this case that has attracted these comments. Some of the bankers sent over for trail were as guilty as sin, but inoccence or guilt is not the issue here.

    The extradition treaty is not working and creating public uproar each time its enforced in a high profile case.

  13. “I don’t think its a misunderstanding the extradition treaty is unbalanced, full stop.”

    Agreed, and it seems clear that the US has been influenced by pro-republican Irish Americans not happy about the idea that Provo militants and/pr sympathisers might face extradition.

    But this is a matter of diplomatic wrangling. Britain is a sovereign nation, and she isn’t nearly as under the American hammer as people like to imagine. Britain can, at anytime, tell Uncle Sam to “fuck off” (worked v. well with steel tariffs, you’ll remember). Of course, the conventional wisdom is that the UK likes to keep the US in its corner because it gives our little island a lot more political whack than it really deserves this long after the old empire dissolved.

    quid pro quo and all that.

  14. jeb jeb

    For anyone who like to detect a wiff’s “of chauvinisim” they may like to reflect on some of the comments being made in the U.S with regard to the Scottish legal processes and our decision to release a dying man from prison, who further looks like he may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

    Some of the comments are very ill-judged.

    The case of Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi makes for an intresting comparison with this one.

    Seems to be some double standards at play.

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