CHRIS TAPPIN - VICTIM OF THIS INSANE EXTRADITION TREATY

Englishman Chris Tappin has been accused of ‘conspiring to ship industrial batteries from Texas to Iran in 2006’. The case against him was heard by a Grand Jury in Texas – he was not even told about this until an extradition order was granted. He was not present at the hearing and under the Anglo-American extradition treaty he was not able to challenge the evidence against him in a British court. Last Friday (Feb 24 2012) he was delivered into the hands of American Air Marshals and flown to the USA. During his flight he would have been manacled and not permitted to use the plane’s toilet without the surveillance of a marshal. On arrival he was chained, hands and feet, and made to wear the orange garb of a prisoner. He will be held in a solitary cell until his bail application is heard. It is unlikely that the application will be granted because he has fought the extradition order. Chris Tappin is 65.

My reaction to this – which is to deplore absolutely the Anglo-American Treaty – is based largely upon my reading of the book ‘Gang of One’, by Gary Mulgrew, one of the ‘Natwest Three’ (irrevocably linked to the famous Enron scandal although Mulgrew’s case involved an accusation of fraud against his employers National Westminster Bank). Here Mulgrew describes what happened to him when he was transported to the USA and became enmeshed in the American legal system which led to his incarceration in a notorious gang-infested prison in Texas, called Big Springs. He was told that if his case went to court he would get 35 years. If he pleaded Guilty then he’d get away with around 3 years and would be able to serve some of his time in a UK prison.

Mulgrew’s description of life in the gaol beggars belief. The guards maintain control of entrance and exit to the prison, they lock up each evening the buildings where convicts are held and open them in the morning. Within the gaol itself control is entirely in the hands of gangs whose existence is known to the prison authorities to the extent that the tattoos the gang members wear are kept on record and membership of one gang or another is more or less expected; the gangs are de facto part of the control system. Mulgrew, a Scot, is put into one of the buildings that house the convicts. No cosy little cell where he must share space with two or at most four prisoners but one vast room containing between 60 and 80 men and allocated one bunk and one locker so close to the next that two men cannot change their clothing at the same time. The gangs control everything that happens in that room as well as what happens in the space outside it when the doors are opened.

Everyone is expected to join a gang the choice of which will depend upon one’s origins, ethnicity or one’s interpretation of one’s ethnicity (eg are you White or are you Aryan Brotherhood?) and there is often a price to be paid for acceptance, such as assisting in the beating up of another prisoner or, having been supplied with a blade, murdering someone. The title of the book refers to Mulgrew’s remarkable good luck in persuading what amounted to a council of all the gangs that as a Scot there was no gang that he could join and that he should be regarded as a ‘Gang of One’ and should be left to himself.

Mulgrew describes a gang assault on a newly arrived prisoner who bunked near to him: first four men armed with the weapon of choice, the lock in a sock, then three more, then three more and finally one more who kicked and kicked and kicked the by now unconscious victim. This is the kind of assault that Mulgrew might have been compelled to carry out if he had joined a gang, this is the kind of assault he might have suffered had he unwittingly offended a member of any of the gangs.

Towards the end of his incarceration in Big Springs Mulgrew witnessed the murder of a man who had just been transferred from another gaol and had been a member of a gang that was a rival of the Aryan Brotherhood. In broad daylight the man was kicked to death by members of the gang. It is one of the most disturbing descriptions of violence that I have ever read. It sickened me.

After his long stay in Big Springs, after four more prisons in the US and two in England, Gary Mulgrew walked free. His survival seems to derive from his own particularly robust and courageous character and from plain good luck. He could just as easily be dead.

The point of my total opposition to the Anglo-American Treaty is not concerned with the guilt or innocence of either Mulgrew or Tappin but with the difference between the two systems of justice and the two views of what constitutes punishment. They are not equivalent and should not be judged in that light.

The USA system allows for ‘plea-bargaining’ with the threat of a huge time in gaol balanced against a (relatively) short time and that alone is a scandal. In the UK pleading guilty may very well result in a less severe sentence than pleading not guilty and then being found guilty but a deal is not fixed up in advance of a trial as it appears to happen in the USA. Mulgrew did not believe himself to be guilty but he was persuaded by a US lawyer that he hadn’t a chance of being found not guilty so, against his better judgement, he went with the advice and pleaded guilty.

At the absolute heart of my argument is that incarceration in a place like Big Springs is form of punishment unlike anything we have in the UK. Of course anyone locked up in a British prison might come to grief through the action of one or two homicidal inmates but the US system practically builds this high level of risk into the sentence and makes it part of the punishment. The way that Big Springs is run, by guards on the outside and gangs on the inside, is to deny a prisoner any rights to protection. A sentence of three years in the UK means incarceration in a prison for that period and no more, it does not include as part of the punishment the daily exposure to horrifying violence that might, on the whim of a pathological monster or gang of monsters, be focused on the sentenced person.

In Britain Mulgrew’s alleged crime would have been seen to be a crime without violence and to all intents and purposes a victimless crime. He would not have been locked up with men who had committed crimes of violence, murder, rape. He would have been locked up in an Open Prison (think Sir Jeffrey Archer, for example) where he would have been in a safe environment, where he could be visited by friends and relations. His punishment would have been the deprivation of freedom for a determined period of time. In the USA there are easier prisons comparable to our Open Prisons but foreign prisoners arriving via the Treaty may not be placed there.

I do not disagree with the principle of extradition. If someone commits a crime in the UK and then manages to skip out of the country to another then there should be the power to bring them back to face justice but here any punishment will be loss of freedom and no more.

Until the USA can guarantee that extradited UK nationals will be treated in exactly the same way as American nationals extradited to the UK would be then the current Treaty must be broken into pieces.

Meanwhile, your thoughts should go to Chris Tappin who is moving into the USA system of justice as I write.


TO ANYONE WHO READS THIS: BUY AND READ GARY MULGREW’S BOOK ‘GANG OF ONE’. ON KINDLE IT WILL COST YOU £8.99, HARDBACK EDITION VIA AMAZON £9.86. THEN WRITE TO YOUR MP AND PROTEST AGAINST THE TREATY.