“Isn’t murder, jail breaking, aircraft hijacking, extortion, criminal flight, and a few other things a good enough reason for most civilized countries?”
I agree. However, given the history of the USA in the 1960’s I can appreciate a European court having qualms about the conviction of a black man for just about anything in the USA of that period.
Playing Devil’s Advocate, if the man were convicted of a crime he did not commit as a means of silencing an ‘uppity (black person)’ then he’d have been politically oppressed and his hijack of an aircraft in order to escape the USA would be perceived as a rational act by another country.
By comparison, how many Russians stole or hijacked aircraft in order to escape to the USA during the Cold War? Should we have blithely sent them back because what they did was a crime in the USSR? Or did we reserve the right to evaluate their act on our own?
I do not know the particulars of this man’s original conviction but given that black men were routinely killed on the street back then for things they didn’t do it is then not inconceivable that his original conviction was politically or racially motivated.
Then, even if true, the court in Portugal will weigh the actions of this man over the past 50 years and see if he is reformed. If he is then there is no constructive purpose to be met by sending him to jail effectively for the rest of his life.
“I do not know the particulars of this man’s original conviction but given that black men were routinely killed on the street back then for things they didn’t do it is then not inconceivable that his original conviction was politically or racially motivated.”
It’s easy enough to find the particulars. Here’s a fairly good synopsis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wright_%28criminal%29
Why are you defending this street thug turned leftist media darling without doing the slightest amount of background research first? It also sounds as if you weren’t around during the whole Black Panther era. I was, living the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember it vividly, the assaults, the drugs, the murders, all wrapped up in a very thin veneer of a (arguably) justifiable social uprising.
Along with other such notables as Mumia Abdul Jabbar and Daniel Ortega, these types became the idols of the moneyed liberal left for some bizarre reason. This is also the time when graffiti vandals were suddenly pronounced “artists”, and we’ve lived the blighted results ever since.
Maybe it was something in the urban water supplies of liberal enclaves that created this madness?
In any event, Wright was nothing more than a New Jersey street thug who indulged in armed robberies. When involved in a murder during one such hold up, he was sentenced to prison. He escaped, and found refuge in Algeria as a Black Panther after engaging in some air piracy.
To me, this was nothing more than criminality wrapped up in opportunistic political posturing and radical chic. And has absolutely nothing to do with the history of race relations in America, IMHO.
Do you have documentation for that assertion? Something other than the New York Times, Utne Reader or Mother Jones.