On July 30

On this day in ...
… 1947, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (left) was born in Paris, France. (photo credit) In 1983, while researching retroviruses at Paris'Institut Pasteur , she discovered the HIV virus. Together with her boss, she was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery. She is currently the director of the Unité de Régulation des Infections Rétrovirales at the Institut. In 2009, Barré-Sinoussi wrote an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI to protes his statements that condoms are at best ineffective in combating HIV/AIDS.
… 1863, President Abraham Lincoln (right) issued the "eye-for-eye" order to shoot rebel prisoners under certain circumstances. (photo credit) Known as the Order of Retaliation, it stated:

It is … ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.

(Prior July 30 posts are here and here.)

On this day

On March 26, ...
... 1953 (55 years ago today), U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao was born in Taipei, Taiwan. Her family emigrated when she was 8; she attended high school in Long Island, New York, and eventually earned an M.B.A. degree from Harvard. Before assuming her present position in 2001, Chao'd served as Director of the Peace Corps from 1991-92. Appointed to lead the Labor Department in 2001, Chao's the 1st Asian-American woman ever appointed to the Cabinet of a U.S. President.
... 1888 (120 years ago today), Elsa Brändström was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. The daughter of a Swedish diplomat, during World War I she was moved, upon seeing Germans held as prisoners of war in Russia, to become a nurse. The care she gave those POWs earned her the nickname "Angel of Siberia" and, in 1951, posthumous recognition on a German stamp (right). Having moved to Germany after the war, when Adolf Hitler took power she and her husband fled to the United States, where they helped to care for European refugees. She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few weeks shy of her 60th birthday.

On February 5, ...

... 1998 (20 years ago today), Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, deposed as leader of Panama by the U.S. military, was indicted on charges of money laundering and drug trafficking. As we've posted, he was eventually convicted, and he has just completed a 17-year sentence. He remains in prison nonetheless, on account of the ruling last August that he could be extradited to France, which already has rendered an in absentia conviction of Noriega, now 73, on additional money laundering charges. Another Miami-based judge has just blocked that extradition until after completion of Noriega's appeal, which invokes Third Geneva Convention of 1949, dealing with treatment of prisoners of war.
... 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was born in Paris, the granddaughter of Jeanne de Chantal, a French noblewoman who would be named a saint for having established the Roman Catholic Order of the Visitation of Our Lady after becoming a widow at age 28. Marie herself was widowed at age 26 after her husband was fatally wounded in a duel. Under her married name, Marie Sévigné (above), she wrote letters to her daughter until her own death in 1696. Still in print, this 25-year correspondence remains an important artifact of the times in which Mme de Sévigné lived.

Plus ça change: The Trial of Henry Wirz

The 1865 trial of Henry Wirz (right) before a military commission is often touted as a prominent early war crimes prosecution. Wirz, Swiss by birth, was a Confederate Captain. After spending a year in Europe as a special emissary to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, he was appointed commander of Camp Sumter (below) near Andersonville, GA. The prison housed Union POWs. At one point, its population swelled to 33,000 persons, making the prison the 5th largest city in the Confederacy, according to one report. Of the almost 50,000 prisoners detained in the camp during the war, over 10,000 apparently died of disease and malnutrition given the over-crowded and squalid conditions.

At the end of the War, General Robert Lee and other high level Confederate officials (including the Confederate Secretary of War) were to be charged with the broad crime of conspiring to injure the health of Union soldiers held in the Confederate states. However, in August 1865, President Andrew Johnson (left) ordered that the high-level charges be dropped. Nonetheless, Wirz was eventually prosecuted for mistreating and murdering Union soldiers detained in the prison in violation of the laws and customs of war. Several former prisoners testified against him.

In his defense, Wirz argued that under the circumstances of the war, he was unable to ensure proper conditions in the prison and was otherwise just following orders. In pleading his case, he wrote:

I do not think that I ought to be held responsible for the shortness of rations, for the overcrowded state of the prison (which was in itself a prolific cause of the fearful mortality), for the inadequate supplies of clothing, and of shelters &c. Still I now bear the odium, and men who were prisoners here seemed disposed to wreak their vengeance upon me for what they have suffered, who was only the medium, or I may better say, the tool in the hands of my superiors.

May 7, 1865 letter from Capt. Hy Wirz to Maj. Gen. J. H. Wilson. (This letter, the indictment, and judgment against Wirz are available in U.S. Army, 8 The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.)

The military commission rejected Wirz’s defense and sentenced him to death by hanging. Notwithstanding that many wrote to President Andrew Johnson pleading Wirz’s pardon or at least the commutation of the death sentence, Wirz was hanged on November 10, 1865 (left). On the gallows, he reputedly stated:

I know what orders are. And I am being hanged for obeying them.

Goodbye to "Get Out of Jail Free!" cards

There's much food for thought in the news of U.S. District Judge William M. Hoeveler's ruling that Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, due for release next week from U.S. federal prison, may be extradited to France, where he's been convicted in absentia of laundering proceeds from drug trafficking through French banks and the French real estate market.

There's the decision itself, of course:

Convicted of drug trafficking by a Miami-based jury in 1992, Noriega, de facto ruler of Panama at the time of his 1989 capture there by U.S. troops, enjoys, by judicial order, the status of a prisoner of war protected by the Third Geneva Convention. Hoeveler's decision hinged, therefore, on his conclusion that the Convention does not forbid transferring a POW to a 3d state for criminal trial. Noriega's attorney's said to be mulling "whether to challenge the ruling in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit or with the United Nations." That last reference comes as a surprise. Can't think of any U.N. body that might be able to do anything enforceable in the matter except the Security Council, where, of course, the United States and France both have power to veto any such move.

And then there's the larger picture:

As more and more states reach outside their own territory to exercise criminal jurisdiction, it seems likely that the most notorious persons who suffer conviction and less-than-a-life-sentence in 1 sovereign state will look forward not to a final release date, but rather, on release, to a move to another jail in another sovereign state. Perhaps it's the ne bis in idem (that's double jeopardy, roughly speaking) overtones in this prospect that explain France's no-comment on the still-pending U.S. case -- as Reuters' Paris bureau put it, why France has made no official statement but instead "accepted the decision with prudence and discretion."