Right from the start, which was three years and three months ago, the tragic death of Harry Dunn presented a political problem for the UK authorities. It's bad optics when a person with diplomatic immunity causes a road traffic fatality, because every government knows the protected party will be allowed to depart the host country and not be prosecuted. Persons with such status are immune to the criminal jurisdiction of the host country under international law.
In President Obama's words - when referring to an incident in Pakistan several years ago - diplomatic immunity is a principle that all nations of the world have adopted in their mutual interest. Yes, it is. We do it, the British do it, and everybody else does it, too.
In the Dunn case we have the rare situation of a host government which got so much internal political pressure that it transgressed that principle by charging an immune person with a crime and requesting that the sending state extradite its protected citizen back to the host country for prosecution. Social media was probably the critical factor in bringing that much pressure via a riled-up public.
Skipping ahead two years, the UK prosecutors (Crown Prosecution Service) evidently entered into extended negotiations with the defendant's lawyers and, most likely, U.S. government parties, to come to a compromise in which the CPS would go through the motions of a trial while the immune party would stay out of the UK's jurisdiction, making any sentence a judge might impose an empty gesture. In fact, "empty gesture" were exactly the words used by the judge at today's sentencing hearing to describe any arrest warrant she might issue.
But, a sufficiently stern empty gesture maybe would placate the victim's family, or so I imagine they thought.
After seeing today's sentencing hearing and the statements made by the family afterward, it's clear that strategy was a big mistake. It would have been far better for the USG to simply refuse to waive immunity and otherwise stand silent. At most, we should have repeated Obama's statement and then said nothing more.
If you have any interest in the case you probably watched the judge's presentation in court today and know the bottom line: a suspended sentence of eight months incarceration and disqualification from driving for one year. The judge arrived there by finding, first of all, that the defendant's offense of careless (vice dangerous) driving was "not far short" of dangerous, thereby justifying incarceration for a period of 15 months. Then, she acknowledged some mitigating circumstances which reduced the sentence to only eight months. All just hypothetical, really, since the judge several times made it clear that she would have no practical way to enforce either a custodial or non-custodial sentence on someone not in her jurisdiction.
The most interesting of the mitigations was a statement the USG provided the court to the effect that it advised the defendant not to return to the UK for the sentencing hearing, despite the judge's order that she return, since doing so would place significant U.S. interests at risk.
And that was that. If the family had been in the least placated by those results, then maybe it wouldn't have been a massively bad idea to strike a compromise between immunity and punishment. But, once the hearing was over, the family and its 'spokesman' took to the Sky News cameras outside the courthouse and made it clear that, far from being satisfied, they are only getting started on public incitement and verbal abuse of the defendant.
Naturally the first to speak was the blowhard spokesman who said, among other things, that "our real enemy here is the U.S. government." The UK government is in his sights, too, since he promised an extensive coroner's inquest "hopefully sometime next year" plus a parliamentary inquiry and "extensive discussions with the Foreign Office." He ended by repeating his declaration of war on the USG: "if they want a war, they've got a war."
Next up was not the Dunn family but instead the spokesman's son, whose name I didn't quite catch but I think it was "Fredo." He joined in his old man's feckless declaration of war against the dastardly Americans, and even added "me and my team will focus on exposing them." He has a team? How cute.
Finally the mother got a word in, calling the sentence "pretty much what we expected" and making some bitter remarks about the defendant, the saddest and most revealing of which was that it's "unfair how she's getting on with her life."
The mother also replayed her emotional victim statement for Sky News, since it was not streamed on the court video.
The interview ended with the added attraction of some live Sky News video from Washington DC in which an obnoxious reporter ambushed the defendant leaving her lawyer's office. The Mum and her spokesman did some color commentary on the attempted ambush interview, and made some more insulting remarks about the defendant.
All in all, it ought to be clear that there is no middle ground when a government maintains diplomatic immunity. Insist on it, point to Obama's excellent statement about it, and then say no more.
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