ONE man dies after being run over while jogging. Just two days later, another is lost at sea. What links them? Both were British men facing 25 years in prison, before being unexpectedly cleared of mega-fraud by a US court only two months ago.
What conspiracy theorists and Hollywood filmmakers will make of this extraordinary coincidence need not detain us here. But the poignancy of the death of Stephen Chamberlain and the disappearance of Dr Mike Lynch — just weeks after they were both handed what Dr Lynch called a “second life” — brings to attention, once again, the problems of the one-sided extradition treaty signed between the United States and the UK in 2003.
Dr Lynch became Britain’s first tech billionaire when Autonomy, the software company that he founded, was floated on the stock market. A decade later, he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. But, HP, after a change of chief executive, decided that it had overpaid, and it accused Dr Lynch of over-inflating the value of the company. Dr Lynch explained what was happening to his six-year-old daughter thus: “Daddy sold someone a plant. They didn’t water it and it died, and now they’re saying it was Daddy’s fault.”
After 13 years, 16 million documents, three court cases, and hundreds of millions of pounds in legal bills, a court in San Francisco agreed. He and Mr Chamberlain, Autonomy’s finance chief, were freed after being taken in chains on a US Airline flight from Heathrow under a US extradition order signed by the Home Secretary at the time, Priti Patel.
Dr Lynch was lucky. Fewer than 0.5 per cent of federal criminal cases in the US end in acquittal. Dr Lynch was the latest in a long line of British businesspeople hauled before the US courts. Most of them ended up behind bars.
Yet, when Anne Sacoolas drove on what she euphemistically called “the American side of the road” and killed the British teenager Harry Dunn in 2019, the US refused to extradite her to the UK after she fled the country, claiming diplomatic immunity — though she was not a diplomat, but a CIA operative.
Under the 2003 Extradition Act, three times as many people have been extradited from the UK to the US than the other way. A review by the UK Government in 2011 declared that the treaty “does not operate in an unbalanced manner”. But the US makes a far higher number of requests: 199 applications between 2009 and 2022, compared with fewer than 50 from the UK. Aggressive US prosecuting tactics then strong-arm British citizens into admitting guilt, with plea bargains that offer lesser sentences.
Several areas require scrutiny. Dr Lynch’s supposed offences were all allegedly committed in the UK. Such prosecutions should be in British courts rather than US ones, even if the complainant is American. The Act does not require the US to show “probable cause” or present “prima facie” evidence of guilt when making an extradition request — unlike extradition arrangements with other countries.
The truth is that extradition is not simply a judicial process, but a complex interaction of political and legal considerations. Dr Lynch had pledged himself to campaign for the 2003 Act to be changed. That task should not be forgotten, even if he himself cannot lead the call.