Police in Istanbul earlier this year released an image they said shows Michael Taylor, who is accused of helping fugitive businessman Carlos Ghosn.
Photo: AFP/Getty ImagesA former Green Beret wanted by Japan for his alleged role in the escape of auto titanCarlos Ghosn didn’t commit a crime in Japan and shouldn’t be extradited there, his lawyers argued in a legal filing Monday.
Michael L. Taylor, the ex-Green Beret, and his son Peter M. Taylor were arrested last month outside Boston by federal authorities, acting on a request from Japanese authorities who said the pair were being sought for the crime of helping Mr. Ghosn flee while out on bail.
Mr. Ghosn, who was living in a court-monitored Tokyo house while facing financial-crime allegations, fled Japan late last year, smuggled inside a musical-equipment box onto a waiting private jet. U.S. prosecutors said the Taylors were key participants in the plot, citing the Japanese investigation which included extensive video evidence.
In the new filing, the Taylors’ lawyers partly focused on a quirk of Japanese law. They noted that Mr. Ghosn hasn’t been charged with a separate crime in Japan for jumping bail. Fleeing while out on bail isn’t a crime in Japan, some legal experts said.
Under U.S. law and the extradition treaty with Japan, the Taylors’ lawyers argue, “it would be a non-sequitur….to make it a crime to help someone else to do something that is itself not criminal.”
They also said the Taylors’ help to Mr. Ghosn wouldn’t be a crime under Japanese law, because he was mostly free to move around the country and wasn’t fleeing the scene of a crime or being detained.
The Taylors’ lawyers backed up their arguments with an affidavit from a law professor in Japan.
A different law professor, Yasuzo Kitamura, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that what the Taylors are alleged to have done—harboring a defendant who jumped bail—does qualify as a crime.
With a maximum three-year sentence, the crime is serious enough to make those accused of it subject to extradition, said Prof. Kitamura, of Chuo University.
In January, for example, a 26-year-old woman in Sapporo, Japan, was sentenced to eight months in prison for helping her husband disappear while out on bail on marijuana charges. The couple stayed in a hotel under assumed names.
Bail-jumping isn’t considered an offense in Japan, Japanese legal experts said, on the theory that defendants already are motivated to observe bail conditions because they would forfeit their bail money and return to jail if caught.
The Taylors’ lawyers also said Japanese arrest warrants, provided to the pair by federal prosecutors after a judge’s order, don’t specifically mention the section of the Japanese penal code that makes it a crime to harbor a criminal. The section, known as Article 103, is the law U.S. prosecutors cited as the reason why the Taylors were arrested on behalf of the Japanese authorities.
Write to Mark Maremont at mark.maremont@wsj.com, Nick Kostov at Nick.Kostov@wsj.com and Peter Landers at peter.landers@wsj.com
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