Look, I wouldn’t call myself a true crime junkie or anything, but I do enjoy a good episode of
Dateline NBC. In fact, I’ve been watching Dateline since before it switched to its present “all true
crime, all the time” format — I’ve been watching Dateline since it debuted in 1992, when it was a
general interest news magazine like 60 Minutes or 20/20 — although 20/20 is mostly true crime now,
too, isn’t it? Trust me, kids, there used to be primetime news magazines other than
60 Minutes that reported on stuff besides true crime — I know because I was there!
Anyway, I still watch Dateline, and listen to it,
since they release episodes in podcast form now as well, and just recently I
was watching when Andrea Canning reported on the strange story of Nicholas Alahverdian.
I’m not gonna tell you the whole story here — go watch the Dateline
episode for that — you should, it’s a hell of a story — I’ll just give
you the broad outline so you have some context if you don’t know the story,
because there’s one bit right at the end of this Dateline episode that I want to focus on.
So, long story short, Nicholas Alahverdian is a thirty-something guy who grew up mostly in foster
care in Rhode Island, became an advocate for reforming the foster care system in that state;
sexually assaulted a fellow student in college, an act for which he was convicted
and forced to register as a sex offender; was married and divorced a couple of times,
charged with domestic violence; investigated by the FBI for fraud for obtaining credit cards in
the name of one of his former foster parents and racking up two hundred thousand dollars in debt;
moved to Europe, got married again, announced he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer,
was reported to have died in 2020, then was found alive in a Scottish hospital in 2021 where he was
being treated for COVID under an assumed name, at which point he was arrested by Scottish police on
another sexual assault charge, this one connected to a rape he allegedly committed in Utah in 2008.
I’m leaving out a bunch of details, and that’s not even the end.
After his arrest in Scotland, Alahverdian claimed he was innocent and that this was
all a case of mistaken identity — he was not Nicholas Alahverdian from the United States,
he said — he was Arthur Knight, from England! He appeared in court and at press conferences using
a wheelchair and always wearing an oxygen mask — necessary because he’d been weakened by COVID,
he said — and speaking in the most hilariously phony British accent you’ve ever heard.
If he was actually Arthur Knight, how did he explain the fact that he had tattoos
and fingerprints identical to those of Nicholas Alahverdian? He claimed police applied matching
tattoos to his body while he was in a medically induced coma during his COVID hospitalization,
and that the corrupt American authorities switched the fingerprints when they were
sent to the U.S. for comparison to make it appear that his were a match for Alahverdian’s.
Sounds totally plausible to me — why the skepticism, Edinburgh Sheriff Court?!
Anyway, here’s the point I’m trying to get to: Alahverdian, a.k.a. Arthur Knight, has been trying
to avoid extradition to the U.S. to face the Utah rape charge by employing a series of increasingly
desperate delaying tactics, including faking seizures, accusing prosecutors of being members of
sex cults, and just straight up refusing to appear for court hearings — but all of those antics
may not even be necessary. A Scottish attorney interviewed for the Dateline story says, in the
closing minutes of the report, that even if the court finds that Alahverdian should be extradited
to the U.S., it could be years before that happens because Scotland has strict human rights
protocols, and will not extradite Alahverdian unless Scottish courts are satisfied that his
treatment as a prisoner will be up to the standard set by the European Convention on Human Rights.
In other words, Nicholas Alahverdian, convicted sex offender and accused rapist and fraudster,
might actually succeed in his effort to avoid facing justice for his crimes in the United
States, not through any cleverness of his own — of which he seems to have none — audacity,
yes, cleverness, not so much — but because the American penal system is such a shit show that
the Scottish authorities can’t send him back here without violating their own human rights laws.
And the thing is, I know there were quite a few of my fellow Americans who watched this
episode of Dateline, who rolled their eyes when that Scottish attorney said that. “Oh, those
Europeans won’t extradite our criminals because we don’t coddle our prisoners like they do!”
That’s a typical attitude among people here in the United States, where we tend to view human
rights protections with the same wary detachment with which more sensible people regard lavish,
indulgent desserts — sure, they’re nice, but not everybody can have them, and too many of them will
make you soft. There’s a common assumption that criminals forfeit the right to humane treatment,
that severe conditions in jails and prisons aren’t anything worth worrying about because
if you’re convicted of a crime, you pretty much deserve what you get. “Don’t do the
crime if you can’t do the time,” to quote the Eighth Amendment to our constitution.
I get it, up to a point. When most people picture a generic criminal in their minds,
they probably aren’t thinking of, like, a tax cheat or non-violent drug offender — they’re
thinking of a murderer, a gangster, a child abuser, someone who has destroyed lives,
someone who represents a danger to society. It’s difficult to sympathize with someone like that.
Nicholas Alahverdian falls into that category, I’d say — accused of multiple sex crimes, accused
of defrauding people for hundreds of thousands of dollars, attempting to escape the consequences of
his actions by faking his own death, pretending to be somebody else, and lying in the most
transparent and insulting ways imaginable when he gets caught — I mean, to hell with that guy. Would
I care if he, as an individual, was mistreated while in prison? No. I have no sympathy for him.
But, we don’t protect human rights on a case-by-case basis. Rights apply to
everyone — that’s what makes them rights. And the rights we choose to protect say
something about who we are as a society. When we guarantee the basic rights of
everyone — including criminals — when we take steps to ensure that the accused will receive
a fair trial and have access to competent representation, and to ensure that the
punishments faced by convicts will be fair and humane — we are telling the rest of the world,
and most importantly telling ourselves, that we are just, rational, civilized people.
If we want to be that sort of people, we need, among other things, to treat our prisoners
well — even scumbags like Nicholas Alahverdian. Handling prisoners with respect for their basic
humanity is not a sign of weakness or corruption. Lots of folks sure seem to think it is, though,
don’t they? There’s this prevailing attitude that justice, particularly for the worst,
most violent criminals, must be as harsh and wantonly cruel as possible or else it’s not really
justice. Viewed in this way, justice is less about protecting society from dangerous people,
or rehabilitating criminals, and more about allowing the rest of us
to experience a catharsis, to feel like the bad people got what they deserve.
Again, to a degree I get it. Emotionally, I get it. Does my heart bleed for fraudster sex
criminals like Nicholas Alahverdian? No. Do I give a shit if some rapist, or serial killer,
or mafioso gets his head bounced off the hood of a cop car, or takes a beating in
prison? Not really. Fuck him. But do I want a system where those sorts of things
are allowed to happen without repercussions? No, I don’t, because if that’s the system,
then those sorts of things can happen to anyone, because we are all subject to
that system — not just the gangsters and the rapists and the serial killers — all of us.
We react to terrible crimes and the people who commit them with anger and revulsion — of course
we do. It’s only natural that we might want people who do horrible things to suffer as a result. But,
we don’t have a vengeance system, we have a justice system — or at least that’s the
idea. If you think the system let someone off too easy, you always have the option
of taking care of it yourself. It wouldn’t be legal, of course, and I don’t recommend it,
but if you feel that strongly about it, you can find whoever that is out on the street,
and give them the beating or whatever you think they deserve. You live out your own revenge
fantasies, and you deal with the consequences. Don't demand that the state do it for you.
And honestly, if we did have a criminal justice system, particularly a prison system,
here in the U.S. that was more up to internationally recognized human rights
standards, it’s not as if a bunch of people would be running out to do crimes just to
get locked up in a nice comfortable state penitentiary. A humanely operated prison
is still a place most of us aren’t going to want to be.
I remember back about, oh, thirteen, fourteen years ago? Someone in the right-wing media,
maybe on Fox News, I can’t recall specifically, got their hands on a photograph of a restraint
chair that was supposedly being prepared for Osama Bin Laden, were he to be found
and captured. The chair had leather straps to restrain the prisoner at the arms, legs,
and chest, but the straps had a soft lining on the side where they would contact the skin,
and the chair also had a padded seat and back.
Since this was during the Obama administration, conservative commentators jumped all over the
image as perhaps the ultimate example of the Democratic Party’s alleged softness on crime.
They spoke as though President Obama himself had personally ordered a custom restraint
chair for Bin Laden — “I want padding on the straps as well as the back and the seat! The
Mastermind of 9/11 must only have the best!” It never seemed to occur to any of them that the
restraint chair just . . . came that way? That the features they regarded as customizations
intended to see to the comfort of the world’s most infamous terrorist were . . . standard?
Plus, I mean, it’s still a restraint chair. Yeah, it’s got a cushioned seat,
yeah the straps are lined so they won’t chafe, but would you want to be the one forced to sit in it?
Padding or no padding, you’re strapped to a chair.
But this is America, where to show a criminal anything less than maximum brutality is to pamper
that criminal! Human rights are for innocent people! And also for me — innocent or guilty,
I demand that my rights be protected! This is me we’re talkin’ about! Come on . . .
Another country — especially an ally, like Scotland, which is a constituent
of the United Kingdom, the country with which the United States has a special
relationship — refusing to extradite criminals out of concern for our human rights practices
should be embarrassing to us as Americans. It should make us examine ourselves. Really?
Have we driven this thing that far off the road that Scotland isn’t sure they want to
send us back one of our own sex offenders because they’re concerned we won’t be able
to meet their minimum legal standards for how prisoners ought to be treated?
That should give us pause, shouldn’t it? If the Scottish courts are prepared to keep this
Alahverdian asshole over there, and put up with his lying and his clowning around hiding his face
behind an oxygen mask, pretending he’s too weak to stand, talking in that insultingly half-assed
approximation of an English accent — Scottish people probably get pissed off enough when they
hear a genuine one of those — if they’re prepared to keep him and put up with all of that rather
than just ship him back over here to let us deal with him, that should inspire us to look within,
to experience a moment of clarity, to realize just how far down we have slipped.
This is a single, relatively unimportant example. Nicholas Alahverdian is just one criminal. There
are two million people incarcerated in American prisons, jails, and other detention facilities.
As recently as 2018, the United States had the highest per capita incarceration rate in the
entire world. As of this year, the United States has the sixth highest incarceration rate, but one
of the five countries ahead of us on the list is American Samoa, which is a territory of the United
States. The other four are Cuba, Turkmenistan, Rwanda, and El Salvador. The land of the free!
Not all of those two million incarcerated Americans are living in brutal,
inhumane circumstances, but it sure seems like lots of them are.
For the past several years the U.S. Department of Justice has been investigating prisons in
the state of Georgia, uncovering evidence of rampant sexual assault of prisoners,
overcrowding, abuse of LGBTQ inmates, and “horrific” unhygienic living conditions.
This past February in the state of West Virginia, the Poor People’s Campaign filed
a federal class-action lawsuit representing nearly a thousand current and former inmates,
against the West Virginia Division of Corrections, alleging that overcrowding, inadequate staffing,
pervasive violence, and crumbling infrastructure has led to living conditions for inmates which one
of the lawyers involved in the case has described as comparable to a Russian gulag in the 1950s.
And what about Utah, the state to which Nicholas Alahverdian would be transferred
if his extradition goes through? A quick Google search brought up this article from last year
reporting on an audit that revealed “systemic deficiencies” in the healthcare of the state’s
prison system during the COVID-19 pandemic which led to at least 18 prisoner deaths. There’s also
this article from 2020, where a corrections officer describes Utah State Prison, which has
since been closed, as “Hell on Earth,” and this article from this past November which quotes both
corrections officers and inmates as saying that the brand new Utah State Correctional Facility,
the one they built to replace the one that closed, is violent, operated by poorly trained staff,
inadequately equipped to tend to the healthcare needs of the inmates, and overrun by mosquitos.
If Nicholas Alahverdian was a fugitive from another country where the prison conditions
were as bad as they are in Georgia, or West Virginia, or Utah, and American law enforcement
captured him here, would we send him back? What am I saying — of course we would. Hell, we’d probably
only refuse to extradite criminals to countries that have prisons with better conditions than
ours — “What’s that? Your detention facilities are clean, you don’t practice solitary confinement,
and your corrections system is built around rehabilitation rather than punishment?
Fuck it, we’re keeping him! Because here in the good ol’ U-S-A we know how to handle prisoners!”
— Harshly. And in Bulk!