MJ questions validity of US request

Former presidential adviser Mark Jimenez, a close friend of President Estrada, questioned in the Supreme Court yesterday the authenticity of the United States' request for his extradition.

Jimenez's lawyer, former Solicitor General Estelito Mendoza, said there have been times when the US misrepresented itself in extradition cases.

Mendoza cited an April 1998 report of lawyer John Kester, entitled "Some Myths of the US Extradition Law," which saw print in the Georgetown Law Journal.

"A person can be guilty of mail fraud or wire fraud without having committed the crime of fraud at all. And long ago the Attorney General and the Secretary of State recognized that under many extradition treaties such offenses are not extraditable," Mendoza quoted the report.

In his 58-page appeal to the Supreme Court, Mendoza justified that exercising a "little caution, such as allowing Jimenez due process rights before the Department of Justice, may be useful if only to assure that the zeal [which] gets the better of their (US prosecutors) judgment is not left unchecked."

Mendoza also cited as basis observations made by a "few observers" who, according to him, have "been commenting guardedly for years on the danger of excessive zeal by US prosecutors in seeking to extradite defendants from foreign countries." Mail fraud and wire fraud are the two most common crimes in the US.

"Misrepresentation of the elements of a US offense to foreign authorities is certainly an example of going beyond what is acceptable and amounts to a violation of the treaty," the journal read.

Mendoza also branded as a "hallucination" claims made by the Department of Justice that allowing Jimenez to have copies of the charges against him and giving him the chance to rebut these would only encourage him to flee.