Banishing justice: Extradition limits in the United States

• Published date: 01 November 2021
• Author: David M. Bierie,Kristen M. Budd
• Date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12561

DOI: ./- .

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Banishing justice: Extradition limits in the

United States

David M. Bierie1Kristen M. Budd2

U.S. Department of Justice, United

States Marshals Service, Arlington,

Virginia, USA

Department of Sociology and

Gerontology, Miami University, Oxford,

Ohio, USA

Correspondence

DavidM. Bierie, United States Marshals

Service,U.S. Department of Justice,

Arlington,Virginia.

Email:David.Bierie@usdoj.gov

Abstract

Arrest warrants are an important and pervasiveaspect of

crime and justice in the United States. There are nearly

three million arrest warrants active on any given day, of

which several hundred thousand were issued for seri-

ous violent crimes (SVCs) such as aggravated assault,

robbery, forcible sexual assault, and homicide. In more

than a third of those SVC warrants, however, extradition

is conditionally waived such that an offender can avoid

arrest by leaving town; they can elect banishment over

prosecution. Studying extradition limits among these

serious offenses presents an opportunity to illuminate

both a challenge to public safety and justice, as well

as forces underlying discretionary decision making by

police. To that end, we study all arrest warrants issued

in the United States for SVCs between  and .

We model banishment rates at the county-level within

a multivariate negative binomial framework. Analyses

showed banishment varied as a function of policing

capacity, firearm use in crimes, racial composition, and

voting behavior during the  presidential election.

KEYWORDS

arrest warrant,discretion, extradition, fugitive, banishment, NCIC

Criminology & Public Policy. ;:–. ©  American Society of Criminology 595wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp

596 BIERIE  BUDD

1 INTRODUCTION

Extradition is an important but understudied aspect of crime and justice in the United States.

Extradition refers to situations in which police from one jurisdiction arrest a wanted person so

that officers from the warrant-issuing jurisdiction can take custody of that fugitive and return

him/her to their court (Murphy, ). The concept and authority of extradition is as old as

the nation itself. It was first expressed in  through the formation of the U.S. Marshals Ser-

vice (USMS), an agency charged with pursuing, arresting, and returning fugitives for trial (Cal-

houn, ; Turk, ). The concept was further articulated in the U.S. constitution a few years

later.

A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice,

and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which

he fled, be delivered up to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime (U.S. Const.

art. IV, § . ).

This authority to extradite has expanded overtime to include transfer between counties or other

jurisdictional boundaries; to avoid situations in which any jurisdiction becomes “asylumsfor per-

sons accused of crimes elsewhere” (Abramson, , p.). A core premise of extradition is that it

is fundamental to the rule of law.However, there are additional reasons it is a foundational feature

of the American justice system. This includes a presumption the arrest and return of fugitives is

important to victims, and that fugitives represent a risk to public safety.

Notwithstanding the fundamental right of a jurisdiction to seek extradition, electing the return

of a fugitive is not universal. A jurisdiction issuing an arrest warrant has the ability to waive this

obligation—to limit extradition (Bierie, ; Guynes & Wolff, ).Empirical work suggests

extradition limits on arrest warrants are common. Bierie () examined a national census of

arrest warrants from , showing more than half carried some kind of extradition limit.The

most common limit was a complete denial of any extradition (%), meaning the issuing agency

would not pick up or pay for transport of the fugitive from anyarresting agency outside the issuing

jurisdiction (e.g., the county in which the issuing court is housed). The second most common

limit was distance boundaries (%); for example, an issuing agency would only extradite if the

fugitive was arrested within a certain number of miles of the issuing jurisdiction. Last, about %

of the issued warrants allowed extradition only if the perpetratorwas apprehended in an adjacent

state.

These percentages are substantively interesting in and of themselves, but even more so because

of the large number of fugitives in the U.S. Bierie () found there were morethan two million

active arrest warrants in the U.S.on a typical day in  including more than . million felonies.

The study also reported extradition limitations were spread across all crime types and all states.

That is, there were more than one million fugitives with warrants lacking full extradition author-

ity, thousands of whom were wanted for serious charges such as homicide, rape, and robbery

(Bierie, ). These fugitives could, essentially,elect banishment rather than arrest and prosecu-

tion if they fled the warrant-issuing jurisdiction.

These figures are also interesting because of research suggesting a sizable portion of fugitives do

in fact leave their issuing jurisdictions. Forexample, Johnson et al. () found % of fugitives in

their sample were apprehended outside of the county that issued their arrest warrant. Given that

over half of warrants have extradition limits, and also that thereare millions of active warrants at

any given time, this work implies there is the potential that extradition limits are generating de

facto asylums for hundreds of thousands of fugitives.