Extradition Clause

The Extradition Clause or Interstate Rendition Clause of the United States Constitution refers to Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2, which provides for the extradition of a criminal back to the state where he or she has committed a crime.

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2:

A person charged in any state with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another state, shall on demand of the executive authority of the state from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the state having jurisdiction of the crime.

Similar to a clause found in the Articles of Confederation, the Extradition Clause was included because the founders found that interstate rendition was separate from international extradition. Fearing that it was not self-executing, Congress passed the first rendition act in 1793 – now found under 18 U.S.C. § 3182.

According to a book review in The New York Times in January 2015:

The Northwest Ordinance of July 1787 held that slaves "may be lawfully reclaimed" from free states and territories, and soon after, a fugitive slave clause — Article IV, Section 2 — was woven into the Constitution at the insistence of the Southern delegates, leading South Carolina's Charles Cotesworth Pinckney to boast, "We have obtained a right to recover our slaves in whatever part of America they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before."

The meaning of the Extradition Clause was first tested before the Supreme Court in the case of Kentucky v. Dennison (1861). The case involved a man named Willis Lago who was wanted in Kentucky for helping a slave girl escape. He had fled to Ohio, where the governor, William Dennison, Jr., refused to extradite him back to Kentucky. In this case, the court ruled that, while it was the duty of a governor to return a fugitive to the state where the crime was committed, a governor could not be compelled through a writ of mandamus to do so.

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Wikipedia