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Comment by jawilson | Hacker News Reader

He should argue that because of the prevalence of Covid-19 in the United States and the inability of the US to protect even the President of the United States from Covid-19, that extradition is a possible extra legal death sentence.

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funnily enough that's actually how I was allowed to marry my Austrian wife.

She was pregnant this summer and we tried to get married but because I had an american birth certificate I wasn't allowed to, because the certificate didn't have an "apostille" which is a stamp that can only be issued by the state of birth (Austin,TX) but we live in Austria (Europe).

I found a legal loop hole that stated if your birth certificate was lost in a war or would be substantially hard to get, you can get married without the certificate.

Thanks to the shutdown and the whole COVID desaster in the USA I was able to make the legal case for it and I was allowed to marry her :)

Congratulations! Refreshing to hear some good news from 2020.

Given the state of the US prison system you could make a case of cruel and unusual punishment.

Because of COVID or just the state of the prison system in general? Personally, I would say either case, but the system itself is not going to agree with it. There have been reports of some people allowed to stay in house arrest rather than reporting to jail.

That doesn’t seem to work in the context of MLAT, although I imagine that it depends a little on the country and the case, even though it shouldn’t.

Note also that the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” is actually in the US constitution.

See also: Assange.

The process against Assange in the UK looked like a particularly horrible example of a kangaroo court.

But New Zealand isn't the UK.

I know nothing about the process against Kim or laws in NZ, but the comparison to Assange doesn't work.

The Five Eyes have each others’ backs. As we can see with Assange, the law doesn’t even factor in to it.

You can't really make a case for unusual, given the state of the US prison system.

The extradition case is made in the context of New Zealand though.

Over-imprisonment isn't the reason, fear of death is. The fact that the US prison system is rampant doesn't really make the living condition of one given inmate unusually cruel. The high risk of them catching a deadly disease does.

I think what GP is saying is that Kim’s probable treatment in the US criminal justice system would not be unusual, it would in fact be the usual treatment for US inmates. Inmates in the US regularly fear for and lose their lives, pandemic or no pandemic.

The cruelty point stands though.

Now that would be an interesting argument, hard to argue against it too.

Is he over 55? If not his chance of dying or even contracting COVID is incredibly small. It might be a valid argument to delay extradition until after the WHO declares an end to the pandemic, but not to prevent it entirely.

His age isn't, his BMI is. He's definitely at risk.

He is morbidly obese.

> or even contracting COVID is incredibly small

Citation needed to show that people under 55 are inherently more immune to COVID-19.

not quite true anymore. European countries such as Germany, France, and Italy are having major second waves. Initially, it seemed like the US was doing worse than the world but other countries have succumbed to second waves.

But he's coming from New Zealand, one of the safest countries as far as COVID, to the US, the #1 country in COVID deaths.

*recorded

This argument has been used successfully in EU.

Could you please reference that for me?

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