An Irish citizen who was booted out of the US and extradited to Britain over a 41-year-old pub brawl said the ordeal was a “nightmare”.
Rory McGrath was shocked when about a dozen officers from the US Marshals Service turned up at his front door in New York with guns drawn. What followed was a months-long ordeal that saw Mr McGrath sent back to the UK, where he sat in jail for seven months awaiting trial away from his wife and two children back in the States.
He told the BBC: “It’s been very stressful for everybody. It’s like Ground Zero – I don’t care to think about it, but it’s always going to be there.
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Leeds-born Mr McGrath’s story started in March 1980, when he was 21.
He had been out drinking with friends when a fight between two groups of revellers started. He claims he saw police arriving and he fled to a nearby pub, not wanting to get involved with the cops, but investigators argued he was part of a group of men that assaulted an officer who suffered a broken nose.
Five people were charged, including Mr McGrath, who fled to Ireland to avoid prosecution, believing he was being “set up” and falsely accused because of his Irish heritage. In 1986, after several years in Dublin, Mr McGrath went to the US on what was supposed to be a holiday lasting a few weeks.
More than a decade later he was living there, having fallen in love with his wife Alice, and began the process to become a US citizen. Mr McGrath believed the matter of his charge had long been forgotten as authorities had made no effort to contact him and he had travelled between the US and the UK several times with no problems.
It wasn’t until 2021, when the US Marshals showed up at his door, that he ever thought about the incident again. The process to extradite Mr McGrath had begun years before in 2015, when a police officer in West Yorkshire revisited the arrest warrant for him and made the Crown Prosecution service aware of his case.
Mr McGrath spent 15 months under house arrest in his home in New York before being flown to the UK last July. He spent seven months incarcerated at Leeds awaiting trial and his case was finally brought before a court last month.
A jury found him not guilty and he was acquitted, with the judge telling jurors he didn’t know why the case had been revived after more than four decades. He told them: “We have worse things to deal with, if I can put it that way.”
Mr McGrath’s lawyer, Daniel Martin, agreed, adding he had “never seen such a flagrant waste of taxpayer resources as in this case”. He is now back in the US and has been reunited with his family, but said the case has devastated his wife and sons.
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