News Ruling threatens US power as world’s high-seas drug police

[thegreenhand]

Ruling threatens US power as world’s high-seas drug police​

Joshua Goodman
AP
5 May 2022

Excerpt:

Jeffri Dávila-Reyes says he’s still mystified how he ended up serving hard time in a U.S. federal prison.

His cocaine bust at sea was closer to his homeland of Costa Rica than the United States, and the few kilos of drugs he was carrying were bound for Jamaica rather than American shores.

His plight is similar to hundreds of foreigners swept up by the U.S. Coast Guard in international waters every year, most of them poor, semiliterate fishermen from Central and South America driven to smuggling with offers of more money than they’ve ever seen — in Dávila-Reyes’ case $6,000.

“Nobody can be blamed for being born poor,” he wrote in a recent letter to The Associated Press.

But now, seven years into his 10-year sentence, Dávila-Reyes’ conviction has been thrown out in a little-noticed ruling that threatens a key weapon in the United States’ war on drugs: A decades-old law that gives the U.S. broad authority to make arrests on the high seas anywhere in the world, even if the drugs aren’t bound for the U.S.

It’s a law that helps the U.S. bolster its drug-interdiction numbers and flex its maritime muscle in a region where drugs are trafficked most. But since it often targets smugglers at the lowest rungs of the drug trade, it has yet to make a dent in the huge volumes of narcotics flowing into the U.S.

Full article here.

 

[Conky]

What pisses me off is how the US always request foreigners get extradited to the US to stand trial on serve time in prison there

Most countries except maybe Russia & China comply with these requests

The Canadian owner of the original AlphaBay market was arrested in Thailand at the request of US authorities

He hanged himself in that little Thai cell rather than get extradited to serve life in an American federal prison

Now it's looking like Julian Assange will be extradited to stand trial in the US

He's Australian FFS

These fucking Americans have no right.

 

[falsifiedhypothesi]

I'm an American and I can say, we just love it when our tax dollars are used for jailing a plurality of the worlds criminals.

I fucking hate that we are the world's "peace keepers" and police force.