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LONDON — A Briton accused of hacking into computers owned by the US military and NASA space agency got the green light Jan. 23 for a fresh legal challenge against a bid to extradite him to the United States.
Gary McKinnon, 42, faces spending the rest of his life in prison if convicted by a US court of gaining access to 97 computers in 2001 and 2002, following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
He says he was looking for evidence of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), while his supporters say he has Asperger's Syndrome -- a form of autism -- and could attempt suicide if he is forced to go to the United States.
Two judges at the High Court gave McKinnon's lawyers permission Friday to seek a judicial review of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's decision last October that he should be extradited.
Speaking after the ruling, McKinnon's solicitor Karen Todner said it was "the right decision".
"The judges have granted permission for a review of our claim that the Home Secretary has not sufficiently taken account of the effects of Asperger's and particularly the effect it will have upon him if he were to be extradited," she said.
"It is the right decision. This case has been going on since 2002 and finally we have got the first right decision."
England and Wales's new Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, is also looking at a request for McKinnon to be tried in Britain rather than the United States. His supporters believe he would get a more lenient sentence here.
McKinnon, who was diagnosed with Asperger's last August, has signed a statement accepting that he has committed an offence under British law.
Starmer's decision is expected within the next month.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From AFP:
