No. 938.
Mr. Bayard to Baron d’Almeirim.
Washington , June 4, 1888.
Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your esteemed note of the 14th ultimo, in which you apply, under instructions from your Government, for the extradition from the United States of Maria da Luz Baptista, now living in Boston, Massachusetts, under the name of Mrs. Botelho, who was sentenced in Portugal to banishment to Africa for life for the crime of poisoning her husband, and who made her escape some time ago from the prison in St. Michael, Azores, to this country.
There being, as you are aware, no extradition treaty between the United States and Portugal, your application is based on the principles of reciprocity and comity, which are invoked as peculiarly persuasive in respect to the case now presented.
Your application has been carefully considered, and I regret to inform you that, desirous as I am of acceding to the wishes of the Government you so worthily represent, I do not feel authorized to take the step you suggest.
By reason of a long and, with a single exception (it is believed), uniform course of executive decision and action, it has come to be accepted as a rule of executive conduct that under the laws of the United States the President is not authorized, in the absence of treaty stipulation, to surrender a fugitive criminal to a foreign government. Acting upon this principle, it has become my duty on several recent occasions to decline to comply with requests similar to that which is now preferred, although in some of the cases, as in that now under consideration, the government from which the request emanated appealed to the principle of reciprocity as well as that of comity.
In respect to the act of Congress to which you advert, and which directs the repulsion from our shores of criminals and certain other classes of persons, I have the honor to observe that that measure has not been construed as a law to warrant the surrender by the President of fugitive criminals on the request of a foreign government, or, in other words, as a general extradition act, but has been confined in its interpretation and execution to the limits and methods of expulsion which it expressly provides.
Accept, etc.,