NI: Doherty and McKee Lose Time
01 September 1993
Joe Doherty has lost his case in Belfast High Court to have his nine years in a U.S. prison count towards his life sentence. Doherty escaped from Crumlin Road prison in June 1981 along with Michael McKee. A few days after the escapem, Doherty was sentenced in his absence to life with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of thirty years for the murder of SAS Captain Herbert Westmacott. Mckee was likewise sentenced in his absence and given 20 years for firearms offences on the word of a "supergrass". According to his wife, McKee is the only prisoner in the North whose conviction rests exclusively on uncorroborated supergrass evidence.
Doherty was arrested in New York in 1983 and there then began a protracted extradition battle. He was finally deported in February 1992. Both Doherty and McKee applied for a judicial review of the Secretary of State's decision not to take into account the years each of them had served in prisons outside of Northern Ireland. In McKee's case the refusal appeared to directly contradict an undertaking given by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to the Irish Supreme Court during McKee's own extradition battle.
Shortly after his escape, McKee was arrested in the Republic and given 10 years for the Northern prison escape. Shortly before his release, extradition proceedings began which led to the Supreme Court hearing. It was at this hearing that the Secretary of State gave an undertaking that, in the event of McKee returning to the North, his time served in Portlaoise prison would be taken into account. McKee beat the extradition application but then secretly re-joined his family in Belfast. The RUC raided the house and discovered him hiding in the roofspace in November 1991.
While Lord Justice Murray rejected Doherty's claim, arguing that he only had himself to blame for the delay in getting down to serving his sentence, he ruled that the present Secretary of State should take account of McKee's time in Portlaoise and was bound by the undertaking given to the Irish Supreme Court by a past Secretary of State. Murray described Mayhew's decision not to consider McKee's previous time served as "illogical and capricious". His ruling meant that McKee was due for release on 23 August (1993). The Secretary of State appealed against Murray's decision and Crown lawyers successfully argued that the undertaking to credit McKee with time served in the South was not a general undertaking but one which applied only in the case of McKee's extradition. This had not taken place so agreed the Lord Chief Justice Sir Brian Hutton and Justices Kelly and Higgins, the undertaking lapsed. McKee is now due for release in 200. Doherty is to appeal.