Six years later, extradition appeal comes up in court

Rhett Fuller spent his birthday in court. The extradition appeal of the thirty-eight year old finally made it to court after six years and today Fuller and his attorney, Eamon Courtenay, appeared before Justices Elliott Mottley, Dennis Morrison and Manuel Sosa in the Appeals Court. But while Courtenay was ready to proceed, Attorney Priscilla Banner, appearing for the Attorney General, reported that she was not able to submit her skeleton arguments for the case and asked the court to adjourn to the next sitting of the court to allow her to prepare a response to the legal arguments. Banner’s reasons for needing more time were that the Attorney General’s Ministry was critically understaffed and only one counsel was dealing with legal matters. She said the A.G. is remedying the situation and they will file the argument by the next sitting. Although he sympathised with Banner’s predicament, Courtenay was not having it and said it was “scandalous and outrageous” and “bordering on contempt” as years have passed since the application was made and that the ministry has been known to outsource jobs. Courtenay pointed out that while he is “not relieved that the court adjourn to the next session, practical difficulties arise” in that he has other commitments on Friday. He asked the Justices for leave to amend the original grounds of the application filed in 2002 and replace them with seven others and to argue one of those grounds today, that if upheld, would end the entire matter. Viewers may recall that in 1998 the United States Government initiated extradition proceedings against Fuller in connection with the 1990 murder of Florida resident Larry Miller. In February 1999, Chief Magistrate Herbert Lord ruled there was sufficient evidence for Fuller to be extradited. Fuller then challenged the extradition in the Supreme Court, but his application for a writ of habeas corpus was dismissed by Chief Justice Abdulai Conteh. Today Courtenay argued that the document which initiated the extradition proceedings in Belize is quote “unlawful and void and of no effect.” This is, the attorney continued, because of the fact that there is no law in Belize that authorised the Minister of Foreign Affairs to order the Chief Magistrate to issue a warrant for the apprehension of any fugitive or criminal. According to Courtenay, post independence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began handling extradition duties, but he says he could not find any instrument where the then governor of Belize delegated such powers to a minister.

Eamon Courtenay, Attorney for Rhett Fuller
“That goes back to a very old law and as you heard me say to the judges, our searches so far we cannot find anything. What the judges said is listen, go overnight and search and search and see if you can find anything; see if there is something somewhere. So we will be going back to look in the archives to see if we can find anything at all that gave the minister to do this. We referred to a Bahamas case where in the Bahamas it was given to the governor general. My understanding is that there is no similar law in Belize. So the way it looks right now and we have to research it further overnight is that there may have been no law that authorised a minister to do this. If that is the situation, this request is unlawful and anybody else who is waiting for extradition, there is no law that would authorise an extraditing at this moment. So it’s a very important issue and we need to make certain overnight that there is no law that would authorise it. I don’t know why it hasn’t been challenged in the past or if it was challenged in the past, but in doing the research in the case we were looking at every ground we could find and this one came to us and so we have decided to press it.”

Banner will reply to Courtenay’s argument on Friday, while the substantive matter will be heard at the next sitting of the Court of the Appeals. At that time, Courtenay will argue the six remaining points including, the six year delay in the case, which he says has prejudiced Fuller’s case and is also grounds for the entire extradition to be stopped.