While extradition requests should be relatively simple, with any questions being answered in the courts, in practice, these are often messy and political while subject to public pressure and delays.

The US has been at the centre of various questionable extradition cases where the sovereignty of countries has been very much the issue.

Given the questions facing the Jamaican Government, it is worth examining a few of the controversial cases, especially those with relevance to the Caribbean.

The Noriega Case

Overthrown by US forces in a 1989 invasion condemned by the Organisation of American States (of which Jamaica is a member), Panama President Manuel Noriega, a former US ally and CIA asset, was accused of profiting from drug shipments through his country.

In one of many twists to the political plot surrounding him, a judge in 2007 ordered Noriega, then finishing a jail sentence in the US, extradited to France - not Panama - where he is wanted for murder, to stand trial on drug charges.

Many questions hang over Noriega's case, not least is whether he was taken to the US legally in the first place. Many experts think he was simply abducted. His biography claims he was overthrown for refusing to allow his country to be used in covert operations against Nicaragua.

Posada Carriles, Cuban Nemesis

Luis Posada Carriles - an enemy of the Cuban government, is widely held to have blown up a Cuban airliner off Chapel Gap, Barbados, in 1976, killing 73 people, including 11 Guyanese youth. Many of the youth were athletes and medical students.

Carriles is a terrorist, "... admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks", says the US Justice Department. Carriles also worked for the CIA, and was trained in explosives for the US Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, according to CNN. Declassified documents, available online, suggest the CIA knew of plans to bomb the plane.

Carriles escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 while awaiting trial for the Barbados bombing and, 15 years later, was arrested in Panama with weapons during a visit by Fidel Castro.

Later, Carriles was "pardoned" of charges that he had planned to murder Castro by then President Mireya Moscoso, as the Panama head of state finished out her term. He made his way to Miami and asked for asylum. But despite acknowledging Carriles' criminal activities, the US has refused to allow his extradition to Venezuela on the incendiary grounds that he "faces torture" there.

The Carriles case sheds a disturbing light on US foreign policy across half a century. But it is straightforward in one sense. The US has shielded an admitted terrorists from prosecution for crimes committed against several Caribbean countries.

Libya and the Lockerbie Incident

In 1988, a Pan Am jet exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Two hundred and seventy people died, most of them US and British citizens. Libya, which holds no extradition treaty with either country, offered to try two Libyan men accused of bombing the plane, but was turned down. After much politicking, one Ali Mohmet El Megrahi was found guilty in a highly unusual trial that took place in The Netherlands. Many people think El Megrahi was innocent, including family members of the British victims.

El Megrahi's recent release from a Scottish prison on grounds of failing health brought celebrations in Libya, where jubilant crowds were assumed to be celebrating the victims' deaths through terrorism. Allegations that the British government pressured Scotland to release El Megrahi, in hope of a leg-up for British business interests, and to secure vital oil supplies, are likely to prove one of the last nails in a hapless Labour government's coffin.

Guantanamo and Extraordinary Rendition

Meanwhile, 100 miles from Jamaica at Guantánamo, Cuba, US prisoners from Afghanistan and elsewhere have been held for almost a decade without due process, diminishing US moral standing in the eyes of the world.

Cases where Muslims have been "rendered" to third-party countries and tortured under interrogation are legion, increasingly acknowledged by the US.

In Italy last week, 22 American CIA agents were found guilty of the 2003 kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar in broad daylight on a Milan street - in clear violation of Italian sovereignty - secretly taking him to Egypt, where he alleges he was tortured before being released.

Some equilibrium has been restored to US legal standing with the election of Barack Obama as president, with early avowals he would close down Guantánamo. But that has not yet happened; the practice of extraordinary rendition continues.

The 'rogue state' label that could be hung on Jamaica if it fails to comply with the request for Christopher Dudus Coke could, in recent times, more accurately describe the US.