Daniel Magee flew back to his homeland after allegedly shooting and wounding a man in Austin in 2016. Late last year, a judge in Scotland ruled that Magee will not be forced back to Texas to stand trial based on the conditions of Texas prisons. Magee is now free.
Houstonian Keri Blakinger is a reporter for the Marshall Project, which covers the US justice system. She says the reason for the court's decision is that Texas prisons could be in violation of Article Three of the European Convention of Human Rights. That's the equivalent of their ban on cruel and unusual punishment. "In other words, they decided that Texas prisons would be cruel and unusual, and in European terms that means that the guy could be possibly be subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading punishment."
Several different things came up during this. Europeans, she says, are concerned with a lack of independent oversight in our prison system. There is some oversight but there aren't independent outside inspectors. "They also took issue with our over-reliance on the use of solitary confinement, on understaffing, with the food and lack of privacy." Another concern was a lack of air conditioning in Texas.
She says one of the most clear cut factors was the cell size. There is a 2012 European case that decided the minimum cell size must be at least three square meters of unencumbered space per person, meaning that space cannot include the bed and the toilet and other fixtures in a prison cell. In Texas, most of the cells exceed that. Some are barely half that space. "When the court in Scotland heard evidence to that effect and the TDCJ (Texas Department of Criminal Justice) confirmed that this is the layout of some of our cell sizes, they said can you give us assurance that this guy will not be housed in a cell that is that small. TDCJ refused to make that assurance and that is why they determined they could not consider extraditing him in the end."
She says a lot of court records in Scotland are not public record, so it's hard to determine which factor carried the most weight. The judge did not issue a written opinion. Blakinger says it's harder for other lawyers to cite this case and it makes it harder for this decision to have an impact on other cases overseas.
Blakinger herself was incarcerated for close to two years in New York. She says US prisons are appalling to many other parts of the world and almost any state prison system would not measure up to European standards. Cells are smaller here and there is an over-reliance on solitary confinement. "One of the things I've been struck by reporting in the South is how much worse some of the prisons are down here. I think that's a thing you might expect and I think I might have guessed but I don't think I fully understood how much worse prison conditions are here. When we think about how the rest of the world thinks about our prisons, I don't think this decision in Texas would necessarily have any meaning for someone trying to avoid extradition to New York because the conditions are very different in many other states. I think we might expect to see some similar problems arise in other southern states."
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