Joseph Gutheinz

It is a long journey that has caused me to ask for justice for accused Nasa and Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon, who now faces extradition to America from Britain. I am retired Nasa Office of Inspector General Senior Special Agent (criminal investigator) who has seen the harm illegal hacking can cause. I was trained by the United States Government to hack into computers to give me an understanding of the psyche of and techniques used by hackers.

I know the likely calibre of the agents who investigated Gary McKinnon and I trust they did a thorough, professional job. With unlimited resources and the clarity of purpose in a post-9/11 world I am certain these agents believe they are on a quest for justice. However, justice sometimes exists outside the narrow parameters inside which law enforcement officers operate.

As a criminal justice college lecturer I tell my students that laws exist to be followed and, when they are ignored, anarchy follows. I am known as a conservative on law and order issues, but I also believe in justice and worry that Gary McKinnon might not find any in America. The US is a great nation and I am a proud American, but my country is weighed down by many archaic legal principles.

After retiring from Nasa I began practising criminal law and found that the American judicial system turns a blind eye towards the needs of the mentally ill. Gary McKinnon is said to have Asperger's syndrome. For two years I fought to keep a young boy out of prison or an appalling psychiatric ward, someone who, like Gary McKinnon, suffers from Asperger's.

In my efforts to defend this child I learned quite a bit about this condition. I found out that children and adults with this illness are often attacked physically and verbally by people insensitive to the private hell they can live in, day after day.

I discerned that individuals with this illness are often fixated on a particular object or topic to the exclusion of everything else, and that this fixation causes others, even family members, to shun them, intensifying their sense of isolation and loneliness.

For a person with Asperger's syndrome the stubborn pursuit of an obsession is inevitable and the construction of barriers in their way serves only to intensify their curiosity and drive to collect information. They act out because they feel compelled to do so. The prosecutors I went against while defending my client were honorable and decent people, whom I personally liked and admired, but that did not stop them from fighting to lock the young person away. Eventually I prevailed, but I could just as easily have lost.

Predicated on that experience, I was grateful when Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed me to the Texas Criminal Justice Advisory Committee on Medical and Mental Impairments. But, once in that post, I witnessed the same lack of concern by law enforcement and the judiciary towards the mentally ill that I had seen as a defence attorney.

While the members of the advisory committee and the individuals who reported to the committee were remarkably progressive in their thinking towards the mentally ill, and advocated alternatives to prison for seriously ill defendants, most of the people who made the arrests and imposed the sentences throughout Texas in my opinion gave little thought to the need to promote diversion programmes for the mentally impaired, programmes that would divert these defendants away from being institutionalised and towards humane mental healthcare.

I hope a deal can be reached with American prosecutors that will offer Gary treatment rather than jail or prison, and permit him to remain in Britain in surroundings and with people who will nurture him. To this end, I ask the authorities in the United States to halt efforts to extradite Gary and instead work out a compromise to protect my country's national security while also enhancing Gary's wellbeing. I would hold a different opinion if Gary were a physical threat to others or a continuing threat to American national security. Neither appears to be the case. I am unaware of any ongoing problems with Gary over the past few years, which tells me that help has been able to get through to him and that his interests have been channelled elsewhere.

If America is unwilling to strike a compassionate plea bargain with Gary's defence team I believe Britain must take steps to protect its citizen who is accused of breaking American law yet who suffers from a mental illness. In the case of Gary McKinnon, I have come to the conclusion that Britain should not extradite this man to the United States to face the prospect of injustice masked as justice. Joseph Gutheinz is a lawyer, lecturer and former special agent in the US.