Chicago Criminal lawyer comments on the Tour de France winner getting a warrant- Mon Dieu!

This Chicago Criminal lawyer wonders if the judge today was looking to get a little payback on the U.S. today by issuing a warrant for Floyd Landis.

February 15, Paris, France

The United States cyclist Floyd Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, but the fallout from his doping case has lingered.

Thomas Cassuto, a French judge, issued an arrest warrant for Landis last month, in connection with a computer hacking case, said Astrid Granoux, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, which is handling the matter.

“That means he would be arrested if he came to France,” Granoux said Monday, adding that the warrant had not been distributed outside of French territory.

Cassuto is seeking to question Landis about the data hacking that occurred in the fall of 2006 at the Châtenay-Malabry antidoping lab, which is the facility that conducted the tests on Landis’s urine samples from the 2006 Tour.

A very public dispute between Landis and the lab’s officials was the crux of Landis’s defense in his doping case, which ended in his being barred from the sport for two years. Landis and his defense team had alleged that the lab’s testing procedures were sloppy, so its test results could not be trusted.

So the question is will the U.S. assist France by turning Landis over? Interestingly, the U.S. has not been successful in getting Great Britain to turn over a gent believed to be mentally ill for hacking into military computer systems in the U.S., while he was physically in England.