Whatever happened to... U.S. v. Burns: Extradition and the death penalty.

• Author: Bowal, Peter

The Death Penalty Around the World

About 140 countries have permanently abolished the death penalty. Some 50 countries have it on the books but don't use it; 36 countries continue to use the death penalty, and 22 of these carried out executions in 2013.

Japan and the United States are the only two industrial democracies that use the death penalty. Notably, in the United States, the death penalty for serious felonies was introduced as part of English law that continued after independence. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down as unconstitutional, but it was reinstated in 1976 which, coincidentally, was the same year it was abolished in Canada. Today, the death penalty continues in 34 states, in federal criminal law and in military law in the United States for aggravated murders committed by sane adults.

The 1930s saw the most executions at almost 170 per year. Since 1976, there have been 1394 executions, of which only 15 were women. In 2013, there were 39 executions in the U.S. and 3035 people remain on death row today. Over 98% of executions and death row inmates are male.

Extradition

Due to the relative ease of crossing the border, occasionally persons who commit death penalty crimes in the U.S. will flee to Canada and, once captured there, will resist extradition to the United States. In 1991, the Supreme Court of Canada in the Charles Ng case decided that extradition from Canada would be allowed in cases where the death penalty was a possibility. Was this about to change?

In United States v. Burns [2001] 1 SCR 283, two 18- year- old men were accused of brutally murdering three family members of one of them. The murders happened in the state of Washington, and both accused quickly fled to British Columbia.

Facts

Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns were friends and classmates who attended West Vancouver High School together. When Rafay's family relocated to Bellevue, Washington midway through his Grade 12 year for his father's work at an engineering firm, he decided to finish high school in Vancouver.

On July 7th, 1994 Rafay and Burns travelled by bus from Vancouver to Bellevue to visit Rafay's family. Six days later at around 2 a.m. Burns made a 911 call from the Rafay home reporting the deaths of Rafay's family. The parents had been beaten to death. His disabled sister also died later that night.

Both stood outside the home and did not help the sister who was then still alive. They did not seem interested in knowing whether any family...