Three hundred years ago few people cared about the murky pasts of new arrivalsto the United States and the countries they had left made few efforts topursue the... » 

Three hundred years ago few people cared about the murky pasts of new arrivalsto the United States and the countries they had left made few efforts topursue them to their new home. Today with the growth of bureaucracytelecommunications and air travel extradition has become a fulltimebusiness. But the publics knowledge of and consequent concern aboutextradition remains minimal aroused from time to time by newspaper headlinesonly to fade.In this readable and compelling history of extradition in America ChristopherPyle remedies that ignorance. Using American constitutional law and drawing ona wealth of historical cases he describes the collision of law and politicsthat occurs when a foreign country demands the surrender of individuals held tobe terrorists by some and freedom fighters by others. He shows how U.S.policymakers have attempted to substitute deportation for extradition and turnthe surrender of a foreign national or even an American citizen into apolitical rather than a judicial process.Beginning with the New England Puritans refusal to surrender the regicideswho had signed the death warrant of Charles I he traces the attitudes andideologies that have shaped American extradition practice culminating in theefforts by the Reagan and Bush administrations to turn the legal extraditionprocess into an executive tool of state policy. Along the way we meet suchluminaries as James Madison and John Stuart Mill William Rehnquist and OliverNorth as well as pirates and fugitive slaves anarchists and refugees druglords and runaway sailors.Woven throughout this story is the authors belief that current developments inextradition law ignoreor actually violate the principles of individual libertydue process and humanity on which we claim our country was built. As heremarks in the Introduction Extradition involves the surrender of humanbeings persons under the protection of our Constitution to fore «