He was arrested in the United States in 1983, and became a cause célèbre while fighting an ultimately unsuccessful nine-year legal battle against extradition and deportation, with a street corner in New York City being named after him.
[4] After his release, Doherty became part of a four-man active service unit nicknamed the "M60 gang" due to their use of an M60 heavy machine gun, along with Angelo Fusco and Paul Magee.
[7] As the SAS members at the front of the house exited the car, the IRA unit opened fire with the M60 machine gun from an upstairs window, hitting Captain Herbert Westmacott in the head and shoulder.
[7][8] The remaining SAS members at the front, armed with Colt Commando automatic rifles, submachine guns and Browning pistols, returned fire but were forced to withdraw.
[1] Doherty was imprisoned in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, and a legal battle ensued with the British government seeking to extradite him back to Northern Ireland.
[14][15] In December 1984, United States district judge John E. Sprizzo ruled that under the existing treaty, Doherty could not be extradited as the killing of a British soldier engaged in active combat was a "political offense"[15][16] and his actions did not involve violence against civilians, including government representatives.
[17] In his finding, Sprizzo wrote the political offense exception was extended to guerilla warfare in addition to "actual armed insurrections or more traditional and overt military hostilities".
The same would be true of My Lai, the Bataan death march, Lidice, the Katyn Forest Massacre, and a whole host of violations of international law that the civilized world is, has been, and should be unwilling to accept.
We are not faced here with a situation in which a bomb was detonated in a department store, public tavern, or a resort hotel, causing indiscriminate personal injury, death, and property damage.
The death of Captain Westmacott, while a most tragic event, occurred in the context of an attempted ambush of a British army patrol" in Northern Ireland, an active war zone.
[15] Assistant Attorney General Stephen S. Trott of the U.S. Justice Department Criminal Division said he was "outraged" because it made the United States legal system complicit in terrorism.
The administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan called Sprizzo's finding "fundamentally flawed" because in it "murder and assault are effectively sanctioned as a form of political activity in a democracy.
"[22] Belfast author Jack Holland noted the decision "had come at the time when the [Reagan] administration was trying to present a united front against 'international terrorism' and the idea that a U.S. judicial officer....should distinguish between some politically motivated violent acts and others was obviously outrageous."
It represented a limiting of the scope of the political-offense exception to actually exclude most of the kinds of crimes that the Reagan government and the popular press were accusing it of glorifying or excusing.
In [the] future, any judge or magistrate contemplating finding in favor of the political-exception defense could not help being intimidated by the prospect of the denunciations and controversy that the finding would be bound to produce.Arguing against Doherty's extradition in a New York Times editorial opinion on 19 February 1992, Professor Christopher Pyle stated: Mr. Doherty was not extraditable for the same reason that Britain would not surrender Confederate soldiers who fled to Canada during our Civil War [e.g., St. Albans Raid].
[24] Sprizzo's ruling led to the U.S. and UK amending their 1972 extradition treaty in 1986 and narrowed the number of political offense exceptions by specifically excluding crimes such as murder, manslaughter, and using explosives.