The goverment withheld evidence that could have helped John Demjanjuk fight extradition to Israel, an appeals court ruled Wednesday in a decision that could help him regain his U.S. citizenship.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said its own order authorizing Demjanjuk's extradition in 1986 was tainted because of prosecutorial misconduct that amounted to fraud on the court.Government lawyers "acted with reckless disregard for the truth," the appeals court said in the unanimous ruling. The court did not say whether sanctions against the Justice Department lawyers should be pursued.
The Justice Department declined to comment. "We are reading the opinion," said spokesman John Russell.
The retired Cleveland autoworker returned to the United States in September after the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction and death sentence, based on evidence that someone else was "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.
Demjanjuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981 and convicted in Israel of being "Ivan the Terrible" in 1988.
"Justice has been done and God bless America," Ed Nishnic, Demjanjuk's son-in-law, said of Wednesday's ruling.
Attorney General Janet Reno has said in the past that the Justice Department would pursue Dem-jan-juk's deportation. Justice officials said that would not occur until after the ruling on the extradition order.
Wednesday's decision merely sets the stage for the deportation fight, which Justice has long been on record as saying it is prepared to wage. A federal judge appointed by the appeals court to review the case had concluded in June that the Justice Department unintentionally withheld evidence from Demjanjuk's lawyers.
Wednesday's ruling found the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting office of Special Investigations failed to give Demjanjuk and the court documents that could have supported Demjanjuk's claim he was wrongly identified as Ivan.
Some of those documents could have raised questions about whether government witnesses wrongly identified Demjanjuk.
The court said it would not rule on allegations that Demjanjuk might have been involved in other war crimes.
Demjanjuk insisted he was a victim of mistaken identity and said he spent most of the war as a prisoner of war of the Germans. A native of Ukraine, he was drafted into the Soviet army.
The government lawyers defrauded the court by assuming Demjanjuk was guilty and failed to produce materials that could have helped him, the appeals court said.