How Not to Deal With Murder in Space
A bizarre 1970 Arctic killing over a jug of raisin wine shows that we need to think about crime outside our atmosphere now.
Mario Escamilla was furious. A colleague of his, nicknamed Porky, had just stolen his jug of raisin wine. So the 33-year-old Escamilla grabbed a rifle and set out to reclaim it. He had no idea he was about to get tangled up in one of the knottiest homicides in history—a killing that also raises serious questions about how humankind should handle the first, inevitable murder in outer space.
A supply drop on T3
Escamilla worked on
T-3, also known as Fletcher’s ice island, a Manhattan-size hunk of ice that at the time was floating north of Canada in the Arctic Ocean, roughly 350 miles from the North Pole.
Despite the constant polar sunshine in the summer, the weather could be harsh, with temperatures dipping down to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit sometimes and winds reaching 160 miles per hour.
If contemporary accounts can be believed, Donald “Porky” Leavitt was a drunk, and a mean one. Three separate times on T-3, after running low on liquor, he attacked people with a meat cleaver to get his hands on their booze. On the night of July 16, Porky targeted electronics technician Mario Escamilla, breaking into Escamilla’s trailer and stealing a prized jug of homemade raisin hooch.
When Escamilla found out, something snapped. He was actually an unlikely vigilante. He was pudgy and wore glasses, and was considered quiet, even wimpy. But when he heard about the theft, he grabbed the base rifle and marched over to confront Porky.
Unfortunately, Escamilla didn’t know that the rifle he’d grabbed was faulty. One hard bump—even without pulling the trigger—and it would fire.
Escamilla found Porky in a trailer with a meteorological technician named Bennie Lightsy, who was Escamilla’s boss on T-3. Porky and Lightsy were, to put it mildly, shitfaced. They’d been drinking a truly foul mix of raisin wine, grain alcohol, and grape juice; Lightsy’s blood-alcohol level was later estimated to be 0.26.
A struggle for the raisin wine ensued, and in the confrontation that followed, Escamilla shot not Porky Leavitt, but his boss, Bennie Lightsy, square in the chest. He bled out moments later.
T-3 was technically run by the U.S. Air Force, but Escamilla was a civilian, so they couldn’t court-martial him. The nearest land mass was Canada, but T-3 lay well outside Canada’s territorial waters, so it had no jurisdiction there. Perhaps the law of the sea applied? After all, T-3 was in some sense the literal high seas, being high-latitude frozen seawater. Except, the law of the sea applies only to navigable areas, and T-3 wasn’t navigable.
In the end, might essentially tried to make right here. Four U.S. marshals undertook a
harrowing, multiday journey via plane and helicopter, first to Greenland and then T-3, fighting brutal Arctic winds and weather. Upon landing, they grabbed Escamilla, the rifle, and Lightsy’s frozen body for transport back to the United States. Escamilla was then charged with murder in a federal court in Virginia. Why there? For the less-than-airtight reason that, well, Virginia was the first place the marshals and Escamilla landed after leaving Greenland, at Dulles Airport.
The trial presented all sorts of legal issues. First, there was the question of whether the government even had the right to try Escamilla, given T-3’s legal limbo. Second, there was the question of venue. Technically, the marshals and Escamilla had landed in Greenland first on the trip back home, so according to international law, he should have been tried there. The U.S. government simply ignored this. Federal prosecutors also attempted to charge Escamilla under special maritime law for crimes committed on vessels, despite the fact that T-3 wasn’t a “vessel” in any real sense.
Ultimately, after an initial conviction for manslaughter and the inevitable appeals and remands, Escamilla was acquitted of all charges, given the faulty rifle. But because of that acquittal, all the juicy legal issues remained unresolved. T-3 was essentially treated as a freak occurrence—a random, one-off event. But it won’t be.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/arctic-t3-murder-space.html
The Wikipedia account of the case.
maximus otter