Ireland – A recent article published on the Breaking News.ie website told of how a 30-year-old man from Dublin, who has both Irish and US citizenship, is fighting extradition from Ireland to the United States over charges that have been made with regards to website images that depict the rape and torture of pre-pubescent children.
The article goes on to state that the FBI claim he is the ‘largest facilitator of child porn on the planet.’ He is alleged to be the owner and administrator of an anonymous hosting site known as Freedom Hosting, situated in the dark internet, that is unable to be accessed via main search engines.
Lawyers for Eric Eoin Marques carried out tests, where he is currently situated in the Irish Midlands, and confirmed that he has Asperger’s syndrome.
Professor Patricia Casey, a psychiatrist from Dublin’s Mater Hospital, assessed Mr Marques along with Odhran McCarthy, a senior clinical psychologist in the Mater Hospital.
A report on May 7, confirmed a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, although State prosecutors have since indicated that they want to carry out their own independent assessments.
The extradition hearing that was due to open on May 11 has now been delayed until June, because of the new medical evidence that was presented. He is wanted in the connection of advertising child pornography, distribution of child pornography, conspiracy to advertise child pornography and conspiracy to distribute child pornography.
Last November, he told the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) that he would plead guilty in Ireland to the charges relating to conspiring to distribute and advertise child pornography, as well as advertising and distributing child pornography.
However the DPP Claire Loftus has indicated that she would not bring proceedings against him in Ireland.
Sources: Breaking News.ie website: Child-porn accused ‘has Asperger’s Syndrome’
Lewis Smith on The Independent website:Irish man fighting extradition to US over child abuse image charges has Asperger’s syndrome, court hears
I do not see how having Aspergers Syndrome would make one not culpable. Usually, people I meet on the spectrum have a very defined sense of right and wrong. I will be saddened to see high funtioning ASD used as a defense against crimes against children.
He isn’t accused of crimes against children, he’s accused of running a hidden server where other people were posting child abuse images. Most likely he’s a cyber-libertarian who wanted to break down online censorship.
AS negates culpability for three reasons. Firstly, laws are made by NT’s, for NT’s, and therefore are oppressive to AS’s. Secondly, AS’s have to live by their own inner moral compass, and it is unreasonable to expect them to understand or obey NT standards. Thirdly, AS is very relevant to whether particular kinds of punishment and process – such as imprisonment, supermax, solitary confinement, extradition and so on – are humane or respect human rights. Given AS people’s sensory needs, social vulnerabilities and need for control over their environment, imprisonment and other restrictive and authoritarian environments amount to torture or inhuman treatment.
Eric Marques was not running a child porn website, nor was he facilitating one. He was a young man with autism who sat in his bedroom and created the largest website hosting portal on the deep web. He rented servers all over the world. He had a policy that nothing illegal could be hosted. He also had a policy of privacy where he did not look at the sites. Prices for his sites were very cheap and they were very easy to use. His only concern was in getting more servers and making more sites available. It was a one-man business, although he claimed on his website that it was not.
Other big website hosts, such as Amazon Web Services, host tons of illegal stuff and take absolutely no responsibility for removing any of it. AWS claims that they cannot be the ones to determine if something is illegal or not. Why would the US government expect something much more of one man running a site hosting service than it does of a big company like Amazon Web Services? Have you ever tried to get AWS to remove offensive, abusive and illegal content? They don’t do it. They don’t care. They send out a form email that goes round in circles, claiming someone else, other than their company, is responsible for what is on their servers. Why does the USDOJ think entirely other rules ought to apply to Mr. Marques?
The point about being autistic is that the US “justice” system makes no provisions whatever for autistic people in its jails awaiting trial or in its courts or in its prisons. There are no autism advocates, federal judges have no knowledge of autism, there is nothing provided at any phase. Therefore, Mr. Marques should not be extradited to the U.S. and should be prosecuted in Ireland if Ireland believes what he has done is a crime.