Authorities in Poland moved quickly to issue an arrest warrant for a Minnesota man accused of participating in a World War II massacre, just two days after determining they had enough evidence to charge him.
However, many steps remain before 98-year-old Michael Karkoc would ever face charges overseas.
His family has said he has dementia, but legal experts say health problems are not a defense against extradition under US law.
Photo: AP
Karkoc is accused of commanding a unit in the Nazi SS-led Ukrainian Self-Defense Legion that raided the eastern Poland village of Chlaniow in July 1944, killing 44 people, including women and children.
The Polish prosecutors’ decision to seek his extradition came four years after the Associated Press published a story establishing that he commanded the unit, based on wartime documents, testimony from other members of the unit and his own Ukrainian-language memoir.
The story also established that he lied to US immigration officials to get into the US a few years after the war.
A second report uncovered evidence that Karkoc himself ordered his men to attack the village.
His family has consistently said he was innocent of any war crimes, challenging the validity of the evidence against him and depicting him as a Ukrainian freedom fighter who fought against the Germans.
Polish prosecutors are expected to ask the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to forward their extradition request to the US Department of State, which would relay it to the US federal prosecutor’s office in Minneapolis to begin court proceedings.
Karkoc would then be brought before a US federal magistrate judge, where he could seek bail. The magistrate would set a date for a hearing when he could present any defenses he might have against extradition.
However, according to legal experts, his defenses are few.
“In order to secure extradition, the government of Poland is going to have to provide probable cause that this individual committed the crimes charged. That will be the battleground in an extradition case,” said Jacques Semmelman, a New York attorney and former US federal prosecutor who specializes in extradition law.
Age and health are not defenses against extradition under US law, and Karkoc does not appear to have any other defenses, Semmelman said.
“I have every expectation that this man is going to be found extraditable,” he said.
Before that happens, Karkoc’s attorneys could argue that his health counts as a special circumstance that provides grounds for bail, said Karen Snell, a San Francisco-based attorney who works in extradition defense.
However, it is much harder to get bail in an extradition proceeding than in a criminal case, she said.
Karkoc could appeal if the magistrate rules he should be sent to Poland.
Semmelman said he knows of cases where that process has taken up to two years.
Karkoc is 98. His son, Andriy Karkoc, refused to disclose details about his father’s health to reporters, except to say that he is not competent.
On Monday, he told the Star Tribune that his father lives in an assisted-living facility, while his mother is in an attached memory care unit.
The family has previously said he has Alzheimer’s disease.
German prosecutors shelved their own war crimes investigation of Karkoc in 2015 after concluding that he was not fit for trial.
According to German prosecutors, Karkoc’s attorney refused to allow a medical expert from Germany to assess his ability to be questioned and stand trial, but instead provided documentation from his US doctors.
The German prosecutors called the assessment “comprehensive.”
The German probe began after AP’s story in 2013. The evidence was assessed by Germany’s special federal prosecutors’ unit that investigates Nazi-era crimes, which concluded there was enough for state prosecutors in Munich, Germany, to pursue murder charges against Karkoc.
In 2014, the German Federal Court of Justice said Karkoc’s service in the SS-led unit made him the “holder of a German office.”
That gave Germany the legal right to prosecute him.
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