Court: Saudi princeling remains subject to arrest if he ever re-enters the US

By adamg on Mon, 04/04/2011 - 11:00am

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today a member of the royal House of Saud violated parole after serving time for drunkenly running a man down on Charles Street because he failed to supply a DNA sample before he was booted out of the country.

The ruling means Bader al Saud could be thrown in jail if he ever steps foot on American soil.

In a lawsuit, al Saud argued that from the moment he left jail in 2006 to the time he flew out of the country a few hours later he was in the custody of federal immigration officials who wouldn't let him make a detour to a Suffolk County probation office and that finding him in violation of probation was therefore a violation of his right to due process.

The state's highest court ruled that al Saud knew months in advance the feds would be coming to get him and that it's not the state's fault he did nothing to comply with the probation agreement he signed as part of a plea deal for the way he ran down Orlando Ramos of Cambridge while drunk in 2002.

The state's highest court agreed with al Saud that probation officials' handling of the case was "inappropriate and careless." But so was al Saud's behavior, the court said:

The parties proceeded on apparently different assumptions--the Commonwealth assuming that probation would continue to apply and the defendant assuming that it would not--with no attempt to clarify or communicate. In the circumstances of this case, however, the motion judge's order and issuance of a default warrant, based on a preliminary finding of specific and limited violations of probation, does not rise to the level of a due process violation.