The US Department of Justice will waive the death penalty by the case of Craig Lang, an Army veteran who fought with a far-right paramilitary unit in Ukraine and whom authorities accused of murdering a married couple in southwest Florida in April 2018.
The case is being watched closely by US officials and experts who study far-right extremism, increasingly concerned about Americans traveling to Ukraine to train with far-right militant groups and gain combat experience.
In a status hearing held by Zoom in Fort Myers on Monday, Jesus Casas, assistant US attorney for the Middle District of Florida, told the court that the government has decided to waive the death penalty in hopes of speeding up Lang’s extradition from Kiev, where he is currently residing under limited house arrest.
Ukraine is sensitive to the issue of the death penalty, which it abolished in 2000. Lang and his lawyers have implicated the European Court of Human Rights, which ordered the suspension of Lang’s extradition until that she can reconsider her case. An ECHR spokesperson did not say when the review would be completed.
Casas said during Monday’s hearing that the US government will still seek the death penalty against Lang’s co-conspirator Alex Zwiefelhofer, a former military fighter who has also fought alongside far-right extremists in eastern Ukraine and who has been detained in the United States since 2019.
Lang, 30, and Zwiefelhofer, 23, are accused of using a fake character to lure Serafin “Danny” Lorenzo and Deana Lorenzo to an overnight meeting at a shopping complex in the town of Estero, where the couple hoped to buy fire arms. men and resell them for a profit. Instead, Lang and Zwiefelhofer reportedly shot down the Lorenzos in a dramatic attack, left them to die and stole $ 3,000 from them.
After killing the couple, the former soldiers planned to use the money to flee by yacht to South America, where they wanted to “participate in an armed conflict against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” and kill “communists”. the authorities alleged. The escape did not go as planned, however, and Zwiefelhofer was later captured in his home state of Wisconsin and transferred to Florida, where he awaits his trial scheduled for December. Lang managed to get back to Ukraine, but he was eventually arrested by the Ukrainian authorities in August 2019, after returning from a short trip to Moldova. Border guards arrested him after finding that an arrest warrant had been issued by Interpol.
In a text message, Lang’s senior lawyer in Ukraine, Dmytro Morhun, declined to comment on the new development on Monday.
A parent of the Lorenzos told BuzzFeed News on Monday that they are happy with the development. In April, the relative, who asked not to be named out of concern for his safety, said he did not want the death penalty for Lang; they just want him sent back to Florida for trial. “We just want him to pay,” the parent said.
Bjorn Brunvand, a US court-appointed attorney for Lang, told Judge Sheri Polster Chappell he had “investigated” a possible extradition of Lang, but said it is still not known when, if ever. , Lang will be detained in the United States.
Given the uncertainty surrounding Lang’s status, Casas told Judge Chappell that the government was pursuing Zwiefelhofer’s case on a different path.
Government attorneys Lang and Zwiefelhofer have agreed that the pandemic has slowed their progress in gathering the materials needed to prepare for trial. Zwiefelhofer’s attorney, D. Todd Doss, said he needed more time to travel to meet witnesses and gather documents for his client’s defense.
Lang and Zwiefelhofer first met in Ukraine, where in 2016 they joined the far-right extremist group Right Sector. Notorious for its neo-Nazi membership and alleged human rights violations, it was born out of an alliance of right-wing militant groups formed during the Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014. The right sector then reconstituted itself as a voluntary combat battalion after Russia annexed Crimea and started a war in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.
Other Americans who fought in Ukraine told BuzzFeed News in interviews, Lang and Zwiefelhofer became increasingly radical in their far-right views and behavior during their stay in the country.
The pair left Ukraine in 2017 after the fighting eased, then tried their luck by joining forces in South Sudan. They never did and instead were detained and deported to the United States, where authorities claimed they would eventually regroup and plan their attack on the Lorenzos in order to fund more combat adventures in the United States. ‘foreign.
Lang has since been either in a detention center or under some form of house arrest in Ukraine. He currently lives in Kiev with his fiance and their toddler and must wear an ankle monitor. He said in a hearing attended by BuzzFeed News in February that he gives English lessons to Ukrainians online to support his family.
At the same hearing, Lang claimed that the US government also wanted to prosecute him for alleged war crimes committed on the battlefields of Ukraine.
“Any separatist or Russian soldier that I killed would be a murder charge,” he told a Ukrainian court. “Understand that any soldier I captured would be a kidnapping charge.”
