I dunno, man. I just don’t know.
A federal judge on Wednesday sided with Texas over Minnesota in a rare legal battle over extradition, with Minnesota seeking the return of an immigration agent facing state assault charges related to an on-duty shooting last winter.
The case pitted one of the country’s most prominent Democratic governors against a leading Republican, and it raised a question that federal courts have wrestled with only a handful of times before: How much discretion do governors have over extradition requests from another state?
Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas sided with the Republican, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, finding that Minnesota had not proven that Mr. Abbott had acted inappropriately in waiting to act on the extradition request.
The ruling by Judge Rodriguez, who was appointed to the bench by President Trump, means that the immigration agent could be released from a Texas jail on Thursday after three months in custody. Texas law limits detention on extradition warrants to 90 days.
[…]
Mr. Abbott’s lawyers said that Texas had been reviewing whether Mr. Castro met the legal criteria of a fugitive under extradition law since he left Minnesota at the direction of his employer before he was facing criminal charges. The Texas lawyers also accused Minnesota of acting with an “odd rush to judgment” in its effort to return Mr. Castro to the state to face charges.
Judge Rodriguez said Mr. Abbott was well within his authority to review Mr. Castro’s eligibility for extradition, and that he had found no evidence that the governor was acting in bad faith.
Lawyers for Mr. Walz described Texas’ argument about fugitive status as a “smokescreen,” and warned that basic tenets of extradition procedure were under threat.
“Governor Abbott’s position, if accepted, would mean that any time a person committed a crime in one state and then left the state because of a job transfer, because of military orders, or even because they were shoved in a van, they could never be extradited to face prosecution,” the Minnesota lawyers wrote.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Trevor Ezell, Mr. Abbott’s general counsel, said his office was waiting for the Texas secretary of state to determine whether Mr. Castro met the criteria of a fugitive under extradition law.
He provided no timeline for the process, which Mr. Ezell said was being carried out in good faith.
Kimberly Svendsen, the lawyer representing Minnesota, questioned the delay to act, noting that the two states routinely heed extradition requests from one another expeditiously. “We have never seen an extradition handled like this,” she said.
Ethan Lowens, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school who studies extradition law, called the dispute “extraordinarily unusual.”
In 1987, the Supreme Court established that the extradition clause of the Constitution empowers federal courts to force states to comply with extradition requests.
Mr. Lowens said that bitter political disputes over a range of issues, including immigration enforcement, abortion and transgender medical treatment, had set the stage for a new legal battle over extradition law.
“The politics of the moment makes it seem inevitable that a case like this is going to come up,” he said. “The law in this area is extremely underdeveloped and we have this political tinderbox of a moment right now.”
Emphasis mine, and see here for the background. Non-Trump interests have to try their luck with the random draw of judges, as there are no Matthew Kacsmaryks or Reed O’Connors to run to for concierge service. It’s impossible to take Abbott’s actions as good faith, especially given his bullshit blathering about Minnesota needing to capitulate to Trumpian demands about Medicare fraud before he would consider their request. This is just another terrible example of how the rule of law in this country has been warped, shredded, folded, spindled, and mutilated not only by Trump but by his minions. And it’s all so one-sided, in that I have a hard time picturing retaliatory actions that Democratic governors could take against red states, because such actions – like deploying National Guard troops to Washington, DC – don’t just needle their political rivals, they hurt people, including those on your own side. We’re just not sociopaths like that. Add this to the long list of “things we really need to fix in a deep, fundamental, and lasting way the next time we have power”, because this is the sort of thing that rots our society. Not that Greg Abbott cares. The Chron has more.
Orange piggy’s primary super power: bringing out the absolute worst in everyone who follows him.