🇺🇸 United States → 🇹🇷 Turkey

Following certification of the requested person’s extradition from the United States to Türkiye, the requested person renewed her application for release, relying on the existence of special circumstances and the court’s general authority to consider bail before and after certification. The District Court held that an extradition court has no discretion to grant bail where the governing treaty expressly requires the requested person to remain detained until the extradition request is determined and, if granted, until surrender. It found that Article 9 of the United States–Türkiye Extradition Treaty was a self-executing provision binding on the court as the supreme law of the land under the Supremacy Clause. The court rejected the special-circumstances argument and distinguished earlier authority granting bail because that authority had not considered the treaty’s mandatory-detention clause.

The United States, acting on behalf of the Republic of Türkiye, sought the extradition of Eylem Tok, a Turkish national, on charges of destroying, concealing or altering evidence under Article 281 of the Turkish Criminal Code and protecting an offender under Article 283 of the same code. The charges arose not from the underlying fatal traffic accident — which the record attributes entirely to her minor son, T.C. — but from her conduct in the hours immediately following it: taking a victim’s cell phone from security officers under a false pretext and concealing it, removing her son and two other minors from the accident scene before police could observe or question them, and flying with her son out of Türkiye on one-way tickets within three hours of the collision.Following an extradition hearing under 18 U.S.C. § 3184, Chief Magistrate Judge Cabell denied the relator’s motion to dismiss, denied her motion for release from custody, and certified her extraditability to the Secretary of State on both offences. The decision is a companion to In re Extradition of T.C., 740 F. Supp. 3d 10 (D. Mass. 2024), concerning the relator’s son, and it addresses in detail several recurring questions of U.S. extradition law: the minimum-gravity (one-year punishability) requirement and its interaction with treaty accessory clauses, the treatment of foreign-law expert evidence that contradicts the requesting State’s position, the dual criminality doctrine, the meaning of “charged with an offense” in a treaty that does not require a charging document, the probable cause standard, and the “special circumstances” test for bail pending extradition.