“Kaine spokesman Gordon Hickey says the transfer was approved under the terms of an international treaty- and that one condition of the transfer was that Soering not be eligible for parole for two years.”

It was due to the impact of international treaties and courts which led to the fight to get this murder back to the U.S. from the U.K. in the first place. Many foreign countries have adopted anti capital punishment policies and consider it a human rights violation.

Here is evidence of the problem we have here.

“The Department of Justice has to approve the request. Hickey says Soering has been eligible for parole now in the United States since November 2003.”

This murderer was convicted and sentenced to two life terms and becomes eligible for parole after only 13 years? It was part of the agreement he not face the death penalty which influenced his extradition.

The dead parents of his girlfriend are still dead and will continue to be dead. If they are interested in changing the game at this point I suggest we send Jens Soering’s soul up for final judgment before we send his body off to Germany.

http://www.wset.com/news/stories/0110/696481.html

You do the crime here, you do the time here.

I’ve heard the same argument raised for illegal aliens who commit murders, that we should release them back to their home countries to serve their sentences. We found that in too many cases these folks were being released and would slip right back across the border. Much better to keep them where we can keep an eye on them.

I’d hate to see foreign nationals effectively get more lenient treatment for crimes they commit here than what is handed down to our own citizens.

As for sending the murderer back to Germany, I think that was a mistake to keep him here. If we could transfer all of the prisoners from other nations back to their home nation, that would be that many fewer people that Virginians need to pay to house and feed. Repatriation of the German would save about $40,000 per year.

It would be nice to be able to close a few prisons, rather than continue to build more. Perhaps the McDonnell Administration could look at pursuing the repatriation of convicts to their home of origin on a much greater scale.

On a purely practical scale, Virginians need to set aside our thirst for vengeance and examine the cost-benefits of repatriating all prisoners from foreign countries back to their native countries, with an agreement that they be banned from returning to America.

I’ll bet Kaine wasn’t expecting anyone to notice this was going through and figured since so much of the staff would be held over they’d lose this one during the transition. Then McDonnell would get surprised by it when it got published, but find that the process of un-doing something after it’s already done might be too difficult.

Nice job of heading off this train wreck before it happened. I noted that the day after you mentioned this that’s when the mainstream media started running articles on it.