Extrajudicial killing

Based on Wikipedia: Extrajudicial killing

In September 2020, federal marshals shot and killed Michael Forest Reinoehl on a street in Lacey, Washington. The official story was straightforward: Reinoehl, wanted for murder, initiated a shootout. But witness Nathaniel Dingess told a different story to the New York Times. He said agents opened fire on Reinoehl while he was eating candy and talking on his phone. No warning. No attempt to arrest. Just bullets.

A few days later, President Donald Trump appeared on Fox News and offered what sounded less like a legal justification and more like a boast.

"This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I will tell you something—that's the way it has to be."

At a rally the following month, Trump went further. "They didn't want to arrest him," he said—a statement that, if true, would describe exactly what human rights organizations call an extrajudicial killing.

What Makes a Killing "Extrajudicial"?

The term sounds technical, almost clinical. It shouldn't. An extrajudicial killing is simply this: a government deliberately kills someone without going through a court. No trial. No judge. No chance to defend yourself.

Think of it as the opposite of due process. In a functioning legal system, even people accused of terrible crimes get their day in court. A prosecutor presents evidence. A defense attorney challenges it. A judge or jury weighs the facts. Only then, after all those safeguards, can the state take someone's life through capital punishment—in countries that allow it.

An extrajudicial killing skips all of that. Someone in authority decides you should die, and you die.

The term most commonly applies to governments targeting specific individuals: political dissidents, labor organizers, journalists, religious figures, human rights workers. Authoritarian regimes are the obvious culprits. But as we'll see, democracies engage in the practice too, sometimes openly.

What makes this different from, say, a police officer shooting someone in self-defense during a genuine confrontation? Or soldiers killing enemy combatants on a battlefield? Intent and context. A cop defending themselves from an armed attacker isn't carrying out a targeted assassination. A soldier fighting in a declared war zone operates under different rules—the laws of armed conflict rather than civilian law.

The line gets blurry, though. It gets very blurry indeed.

The International Framework That's Supposed to Prevent This

The Geneva Conventions, signed in the aftermath of World War Two's horrors, tried to establish clear rules. Article 3 of the First Geneva Convention is explicit: you cannot execute anyone without first holding a trial before a properly constituted court. Everyone involved in that trial must receive "all commonly recognized judicial guarantees."

This wasn't controversial when it was written. The whole point was to distinguish civilized nations from regimes that murdered people arbitrarily. The Nazis had done exactly that—executing prisoners, political opponents, and entire populations without any pretense of legal process. "Never again" meant, among other things, that governments would be bound by law even when dealing with their worst enemies.

The United Nations takes this seriously. There's a Special Rapporteur—currently Morris Tidball-Binz, appointed in 2021—whose entire job is monitoring extrajudicial, summary, and arbitrary executions around the world. Major human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch campaign against extrajudicial killings. The Human Rights Measurement Initiative even surveys experts to score countries on how well they protect their citizens from being murdered by their own governments.

The infrastructure of international law exists. The question is whether it matters.

The Dirty Wars of South America

To understand extrajudicial killing at its most systematic, look at Argentina between 1976 and 1983.

The military junta that seized power called its campaign the National Reorganization Process. In practice, it was a program of state terror. Anyone suspected of opposing the regime—or associating with someone who opposed the regime—could be made to disappear.

The death toll estimates range from eleven thousand to fifteen thousand people. The victims included intellectuals, labor leaders, priests and nuns, reporters, politicians, artists. Their relatives. Their friends. Anyone connected to anyone who made the generals nervous.

Half of these killings reportedly originated from a single detention center in Buenos Aires: the Navy Mechanics School, known by its Spanish acronym ESMA. It functioned as a torture facility and death factory, processing thousands of victims. Many were drugged and thrown from aircraft into the sea—the so-called "death flights" that left no bodies to find, no graves to visit.

Argentinians called it the Dirty War. The name stuck, spreading to similar campaigns elsewhere.

Chile's version began earlier. When General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, he moved immediately to consolidate power through violence. More than three thousand supporters of the previous government were killed without trial in the coup's aftermath. Torture became routine.

Pinochet created the Directorate of National Intelligence, known by its Spanish initials DINA, as his secret police. Under Manuel Contreras, DINA carried out assassinations not just in Chile but across the world. They killed former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier with a car bomb in Washington, D.C.—just blocks from the White House—in 1976.

These regimes didn't operate in isolation. Operation Condor coordinated repression across the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia. They shared intelligence, tracked dissidents across borders, helped each other kill.

And behind them, often, stood the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

America's Complicated Role

The CIA's involvement in Latin American atrocities remains partially documented and deeply uncomfortable. The agency helped create DINA. Manuel Contreras, the man responsible for countless disappearances and the Letelier assassination, was on the CIA payroll. American dollars flowed to regimes that were murdering their own citizens.

In El Salvador, the connection was even more direct. During the civil war of the 1980s, death squads linked to the Salvadoran military achieved international notoriety. They assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero, one of the most prominent Catholic leaders in Latin America, because of his advocacy for the poor. They murdered four American women—three nuns and a lay worker—raping them first, then shooting them. Those killings were later traced to a military unit acting under specific orders.

The Reagan administration knew this. The Salvadoran military was receiving American funding and training. American advisors worked alongside Salvadoran officers. There were temporary cutoffs in military aid when the atrocities became too public to ignore. But the aid always resumed. The death squads continued operating.

Honduras had Battalion 316, which assassinated teachers, politicians, and union organizers throughout the 1980s. The battalion received substantial support and training from the CIA. When the Baltimore Sun finally exposed the program in the 1990s, the details were stark: the United States had helped create, fund, and train a death squad.

This history creates a particular awkwardness when American officials condemn extrajudicial killings elsewhere.

The Drone Age

Everything changed after September 11, 2001.

The United States had always maintained the capability to kill people abroad without judicial process. What changed was the scale, the technology, and the willingness to do it openly. Unmanned aerial vehicles—drones—made targeted killing cheap, precise, and politically palatable. No American soldiers at risk. No messy ground operations. Just a missile from the sky.

By 2015, American drone strikes had killed nearly 2,500 people. The targets were mostly in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia—countries the United States wasn't formally at war with. The legal justification was the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed after 9/11, stretched to cover an ever-expanding definition of enemies.

The killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 raised questions. He was unarmed when Navy SEALs shot him in his bedroom in Pakistan. The U.S. defended the operation as "national self-defense" rather than assassination—a distinction that matters legally but perhaps not morally.

The killing of Qasem Soleimani in 2020 raised more questions. Soleimani was a major general in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, effectively their most important military commander. The Trump administration ordered him killed by drone strike while he was visiting Baghdad. Iran called it terrorism. The U.S. called it preemptive action against an imminent threat—though the evidence for that imminence remained classified.

But the most troubling cases involved American citizens.

When the Target is American

Anwar al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico. He grew up in the United States, attended college in Colorado, and became an imam. After 9/11, his preaching became increasingly radical, and by the late 2000s, he was living in Yemen and openly calling for attacks on America.

In 2010, President Barack Obama made a decision that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier: he signed an order authorizing al-Awlaki's death. Not capture. Death. The National Security Council approved. Al-Awlaki's civilian rights—his constitutional right to due process, to not be deprived of life without a trial—were suspended by executive order.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights challenged this in court. They argued, reasonably, that the Constitution doesn't allow the president to order the execution of American citizens without trial, regardless of how dangerous they might be.

They lost. The courts declined to intervene.

On September 30, 2011, a CIA drone killed al-Awlaki in Yemen, along with another American citizen named Samir Khan.

Two weeks later, another drone strike killed al-Awlaki's sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen. The government initially claimed he was a military-age male at a militant gathering. His family said he was looking for his father and had no connection to terrorism.

Six years after that, in January 2017, American forces raided a village in Yemen called Yakla. Among the dead was Nawar al-Awlaki—al-Awlaki's eight-year-old daughter, also an American citizen. She was shot to death along with somewhere between nine and twenty-nine other civilians, depending on whose count you trust.

Three generations of one American family, killed by their own government without trial.

The Continuing Practice

Every American president since George W. Bush has continued and expanded the practice of targeted killing.

Obama, despite his background as a constitutional law professor, dramatically increased drone strikes and signed the order to kill al-Awlaki. Trump continued the policy, killing Soleimani and, according to a New York Times report, working with Israeli operatives to assassinate al-Qaeda figure Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah on the streets of Tehran in August 2020.

Biden continued the practice too. On July 31, 2022, a CIA drone killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, who had led al-Qaeda after bin Laden's death, while he stood on a balcony in Kabul.

These killings are popular with the American public. They're seen as tough, decisive, and effective—getting the bad guys without risking American lives. The targets are always described as terrorists, militants, threats. And maybe they were. That's not really the point.

The point is that someone decided they should die without proving it to anyone outside the executive branch. No adversarial process. No defense. No appeal. Just intelligence assessments we're asked to trust, followed by a missile.

The Rest of the World

It would be comforting to think extrajudicial killing is primarily an American problem, or a problem of history's dictatorships. It isn't.

The list of countries where human rights organizations document systematic extrajudicial killings reads like a tour of the globe: Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Libya, Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, Mexico, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan.

Egypt's National Security Agency and Interior Ministry police killed more than a dozen people described as "terrorists" in September 2021 alone. Investigations found the victims posed no threat when killed—many were already in custody. Their families said they had no connection to violence.

Venezuela is particularly stark. Since 2016, security forces have killed nearly eighteen thousand people for what the government calls "resistance to authority." Human Rights Watch found that many of these killings may constitute extrajudicial execution. Amnesty International documented more than 8,200 such killings between 2015 and 2017 alone. When Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations human rights chief, visited in 2019, she called the numbers "shockingly high" and demanded the dissolution of the Special Action Forces responsible.

In Kenya, extrajudicial executions are common in informal settlements—the slums where the poor live—and in northern regions where the government conducts counterterrorism operations against groups linked to al-Shabaab.

Australia has its own dark history. Aboriginal deaths in custody represent a continuing crisis, with Indigenous Australians dying in police and prison custody at disturbing rates. A series of more than eighty murders of gay men in Sydney between the 1970s and 1990s—the "gay gang murders"—remain largely unsolved. And the Brereton Report, released in 2020, found credible evidence that Australian special forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan, including the unlawful killing of prisoners and civilians.

Azerbaijan, during its conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, has been documented executing prisoners of war and civilians—acts that various sources have characterized as ethnic cleansing. The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has warned about Azerbaijan's escalating human rights violations against ethnic Armenians.

The American Paradox

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative scores countries on how well they protect the right to be free from extrajudicial execution. The scale runs from zero to ten.

The United States scores 4.1.

That number might surprise Americans accustomed to thinking of their country as a beacon of human rights. But it reflects not just drone strikes and targeted killings abroad. It reflects a domestic history that Americans have only recently begun to confront.

Lynching was America's homegrown form of extrajudicial killing. From the 1830s through the 1960s, mobs murdered people—predominantly Black Americans—without any pretense of legal process. The practice reached its peak between the 1890s and 1920s. While most lynchings occurred in the South, they happened in the Midwest and border states too. The victims were burned, shot, hanged, beaten to death. Their bodies were sometimes mutilated, their killings sometimes advertised in advance, their deaths sometimes photographed and turned into postcards.

For most of American history, these killings faced no legal consequences. Local authorities participated or looked away. Federal anti-lynching legislation was proposed and blocked, proposed and blocked, for decades. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act finally became law in 2022.

This history doesn't excuse extrajudicial killings elsewhere. But it does complicate the moral authority Americans sometimes claim when condemning them.

The Legal Definition

The United States Torture Victim Protection Act offers a precise definition of extrajudicial killing:

A deliberate killing not authorized by a previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

Note that exception at the end: such killings don't count if, "under international law," they're "lawfully carried out under the authority of a foreign nation." This carve-out provides legal cover for allied governments—and, arguably, for the United States itself when it works through proxies.

The law also implies a troubling question: What judicial guarantees are "recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples"? Who decides which peoples are civilized? Who defines what's indispensable?

These aren't abstract concerns. They determine whether a killing is murder or policy, whether a government is criminal or lawful, whether victims have any recourse at all.

Why This Matters

Extrajudicial killing isn't just about distant wars or historical atrocities. It's about a fundamental question: Can a government kill its enemies—or even its own citizens—without proving they deserve to die?

The practical argument for extrajudicial killing is straightforward. Some people are too dangerous to capture. Some are hiding in places where arrest is impossible. Some pose such immediate threats that there's no time for legal process. Better to kill them now than let them kill innocents later.

The counterargument is equally straightforward. How do we know they're really threats? Who checks the government's claims? What happens when the intelligence is wrong, when the target is misidentified, when an eight-year-old girl dies because she was in the wrong place? And once we accept that the government can kill without trial, where does it stop?

History offers an answer to that last question. It stops when someone makes it stop—and not before.

The death squads of Argentina didn't limit themselves to genuine threats. They killed anyone inconvenient. The extrajudicial killings in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte's drug war killed thousands of people, many of whom had no connection to drugs at all. Power, once granted, expands.

This is why the Geneva Conventions exist. This is why human rights organizations track these killings obsessively. This is why the distinction between legal and extrajudicial killing matters, even when the target seems obviously deserving of death.

Because the whole point of legal process is that it applies to everyone. The murderer gets a trial. The terrorist gets a trial. The traitor gets a trial. Not because they deserve it, but because we all deserve to live in a society where the government can't kill us on suspicion alone.

When Michael Reinoehl was shot on that street in Washington, maybe he was reaching for a gun. Maybe the marshals were justified. Or maybe they opened fire without warning on a man eating candy, as the witness claimed. We'll never know for certain, because there was no trial. There was only a president, days later, suggesting on national television that the killing was deliberate and praising it.

"That's the way it has to be," he said.

Does it?