IU McKinney students conduct research in Russian hacker’s extradition case

While the United States struggled to gain the upper hand in an extradition battle over a Russian cybercriminal accused of stealing more than $28 million in a bank fraud ring, a group of Indiana law students were busy working on research for his case.

Dmitry Ukrainskiy, a cybercriminal wanted by both Russia and the U.S., was arrested and detained in Thailand in 2016 on charges of money laundering and ordered to serve almost 11 years in prison. An extradition request was made by the U.S., which charges Ukrainskiy of wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering for his involvement in cybercrimes related to malware breaches of American computer systems.

Russia quickly followed suit with easy success, gaining Ukrainskiy’s acceptance of its request last year. However, the U.S. was forced to wait until a Thai judge officially approved its request on Feb. 26, making it the first time Thailand has granted extradition to two nations over the same defendant.

Amid that process, longtime Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law professor George Edwards and his fall 2018 international criminal law students conducted research for Ukrainskiy’s case, teaming up with Edwards’ Thailand connections at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University of Law. The students presented their research to Thailand Bail, Ukrainskiy’s representation, via Skype, to address several hypothetical legal questions in the case.

One key issue the class sought to answer was a potential exception to Ukrainskiy’s extradition:  An extradition cannot take place if the crime was political, pursuant to extradition treaty language between the U.S. and Thailand.

“A typical political crime would be something like treason, sedition, defamation of the government, things like that,” Edwards said. “But the other side of the political question is the issue that a person will not be extradited if it can be shown that the person was being extradited for political purposes.”

Edwards further explained the students’ potential legal argument using hypotheticals.

“Maybe it was because this defendant was a former military prosecutor; Maybe that’s why the U.S. wants to gather some intelligence from him about what he did during the Soviet era when he was in those positions,” Edwards posited. “Maybe it had something to do with the U.S. indicting all these other Russians involved with the alleged collusion that has swept into the Mueller investigation.”

The students also researched issues surrounding double jeopardy, learning that extradition treaties can have provisions prohibiting extradition if the person has already experienced jeopardy related to the crime at hand.

“Now as it happens, Ukrainskiy was convicted in Thailand on a money laundering charge and the question was, ‘Well, does jeopardy apply to him?’” Edwards said. “So, if you’re looking at the names of the crimes only in asking if there’s double jeopardy, you would say, ‘Well, there was money laundering in Thailand, money laundering in the U.S. and they cancel each other out, but there are two crimes still standing in the U.S.

“The other way to look at it would be, what are the facts underlying the convictions? If you look at the facts of the money laundering charge in Thailand and look at the facts underlying all three of those crimes in the U.S., you might say, ‘Well the facts are all basically the same, so the money laundering would be canceled out by the money laundering.’ Those were the legal issues that needed to be looked at.”

While Ukrainskiy was not the client of either IU McKinney, Edwards, or the students, research conducted in the class was turned over to Thailand Bail to be potentially used in the case. Edwards said the students’ opportunity to work with an ongoing case like Ukrainskiy’s gave them a chance to experience real life legal issues involving real people.

“We pride ourselves on giving our students an opportunity to learn by doing,” he said. “Students do learn by doing research for real life instances.”