Joe Doherty

Joseph "Joe" Patrick Thomas Doherty (born January 20, 1955 in Belfast , Northern Ireland ) is a former volunteer of the Provisional IRA . After escaping from a Belfast prison in 1981, he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for the murder of SAS officer Herbert Westmacott . He was able to escape to the USA , where he was arrested by the FBI in 1983 and then ultimately fought unsuccessfully for nine years against his extradition and deportation to Great Britain. In 1998 he was released from custody in Northern Ireland and from then on devoted himself to peace projects. In total, he spent around 23 years in prisons. He broke away from the IRA in 1987.

During his imprisonment in the United States, he received high support from the public, politics and religion. A street corner in Lower Manhattan bears his name, and an episode of the first season of the series Law & Order is loosely dedicated to his case.

Childhood and family

Joe Doherty was born as the eldest son of a Catholic couple in the predominantly Catholic borough of New Lodge in north Belfast. He lived in the area of ​​New Lodge Road, which at that time was mostly inhabited by Protestants . His maternal grandfather, Alexander Darragh, was an IRA volunteer, fought in the Irish War of Independence, and was awarded the Irish War Of Independence Medal . His paternal grandfather, James Doherty, was a senior officer in the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) in Belfast.

Joseph Doherty went to school from the age of five to 14 and then worked as a plumber. Due to the difficult living conditions in Belfast, many of his relatives had emigrated to Australia , Canada and South Africa .

At the age of about twelve he was a member of a gang and became a criminal for the first time. Because of break-ins and thefts, he was briefly admitted by a court to a reformatory run by priests.

Career in the IRA

From the riots in 1969 onwards, the previously almost insignificant IRA received a large number of visitors, after having distinguished itself as the protector of the beleaguered Catholics from violent Protestants in spectacular individual actions. The British Army had lost its reputation for seemingly unilateral action against the Catholic residents in Belfast, including the Curfew Falls .

Joe Doherty said he went to the Provisional IRA at the age of 15 in 1971 , where he learned how to handle weapons and explosives and was employed as a scout and smuggler. He became an official IRA member at the age of 17 and was involved in multiple shootings. He was first arrested on January 20, 1972 and spent seven months in a youth camp. He was arrested again at the age of 19 and spent six years in prison after being caught by police while transporting a bomb in his vehicle. In 1979 he was released.

Doherty then became a member of the Belfast M60 gang , which got its name from the use of an M60 machine gun . Several fire attacks on security forces were carried out with this weapon, killing up to eight people. During an attempt to arrest the gang on May 2, 1980 in Belfast Antrim Road , a gun battle developed in which SAS officer Herbert Westmacott was killed. Joe Doherty and the other gang members only surrendered after about half an hour of siege.

In June 1981, Doherty and seven other IRA men escaped by gun violence from Belfast's Crumlin Road prison , two days before he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Westmacott. His conviction was pronounced in his absence. With the help of the IRA, he fled to the United States by plane in 1982 with a forged passport and worked under a false name in a bar in New York City .

Fight against extradition and deportation

In June 1983 he was arrested by the FBI at his place of work and taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center of New York , where he applied for political asylum . Great Britain filed an extradition request in 1983 , which was rejected by the Brooklyn District Court in December 1984 . Federal Judge John E. Sprizzo had ruled that Doherty's act was a political act and should therefore be granted asylum. That ruling was upheld by the New York Court of Appeals and Federal Judge Charles S. Haight after a government appeal.

Since extradition was thus prevented legally, which led Justice Department a deportation proceedings one because Doherty as illegal immigrants came into the country. In the event of deportation, Doherty chose the Republic of Ireland as the country of destination . There he would have been threatened with up to ten years imprisonment for the Belfast outbreak on the basis of a cross-border agreement, but he would have been spared a transfer to Great Britain. This decision was approved by Immigration Judge Howard I. Cohen in 1986. However, the Immigration and Naturalization Service appealed against this . Assistant Director Jay Scott Blackmun confirmed in 1987 that the government's objective in both the extradition and deportation proceedings was to bring Joe Doherty to the United Kingdom . Doherty's attorneys said her client would be deported to the Kingdom in gratitude for British support for Operation El Dorado Canyon in 1986.

In December 1987, under pressure from the USA and Great Britain, Ireland ratified the European Convention on Terrorism , according to which Doherty had threatened extradition to Great Britain from Ireland. Subsequently, Doherty sought political asylum again. In June 1988 Justice Minister Edwin Meese ordered his extradition to Great Britain, a decision that was overturned by his successor Dick Thornburgh . Thornburgh requested arguments for a review of the asylum application.

In 1991 Doherty was transferred to the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania . In January 1992 the Supreme Court, headed by William H. Rehnquist, announced that Doherty had no right to a new hearing and ordered his extradition to Great Britain. According to the court, he is being prosecuted in the UK for criminal, non-political activities.

Some of the people who spoke out in favor of Dohertys remaining in the United States included Senator John Kerry , Congressman Peter T. King , New York City Mayor David Dinkins and New York City Archbishop John Joseph O'Connor . Its popularity in New York was also demonstrated by the city government renaming a corner at the intersection of Pearl and Park South Streets , near the Metropolitan Correctional Center, to Joseph Doherty Corner in 1990 .

Back in Northern Ireland

In February 1992 he was handed over to the British authorities on the premises of a US air force base in England and transferred by the Royal Air Force to Northern Ireland, where he was again detained in Crumlin Road prison . In November 1998 he was released on the basis of the Good Friday Agreement . At the time he was in the legendary Maze Prison .

Doherty had already resigned himself from the IRA in 1987 and, after his release, campaigned for young people and peace projects, including visiting a school in Bavaria for the Peace Counts project in 2009 .

Web links

• Joe Doherty Corner: The Troubles in America

literature

• Killer In Clowntown: Joe Doherty, The IRA and the Relationship , by Martin Dillon
• Extradition, Politics, and Human Rights , by Christopher H. Pyle