Tahawwur Rana was already convicted in Chicago for his role in the 2008 Mumbai Massacre, and now the one-time Chicago travel and immigration agent has learned he will not get a final appellate court review of his extradition challenge.
Rana's last legal stop is the Supreme Court of the United States, but experts are already predicting it's unlikely that will go anywhere. The High Court takes less than 2% of all appeals.
If the Chicago terrorist is extradited, he faces a near certain execution for his role in the Mumbai Massacre.
It was November of 2008 when Pakistani terror squadrons invaded Mumbai, India, taking over the city for days. When the commando-style attack was finally snuffed out, 175 people were dead, including six Americans.
It is still branded as India's 9/11.
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According to federal agents, two Chicago men, boyhood friends from India, were heavily invested in the plot. Authorities said David Coleman Headley, alias "Daood Gilani," and Tahawwur Rana, who owned and operated a North Side immigration aid business, had been moonlighting as scouts for a bloodthirsty Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
In Chicago, Headley pleaded guilty, and Rana was convicted of supporting the terror group but acquitted of helping in the Mumbai plot.
Nevertheless, India wants to put Rana on trial for the terror attack. Rana contends that would be double jeopardy, and he has been fighting extradition.
He has now lost his latest and nearly-final appeal. Rana's request for a rehearing in front of the full 9th Circuit has been denied.
"The short impact is he has almost no where left to go. He has only has one place, the supreme court, and after that it is all over for him," explained former federal prosecutor and chief ABC7 legal analyst Gil Soffer.
He said Rana will likely remain in the federal lock-up in Los Angeles until the Supreme Court waives off his last ditch appeal and then he will be quickly extradited to India.
"There's not a big dispute among the circuit courts on the points of law. It doesn't otherwise scream out for that tiny fraction of cases that the Supreme Court is actually willing to entertain," Soffer said. "So you would presume that they would not take it as opposed to taking it and then ruling against it. Yes, the odds are very, very high that they will simply not take this case at all."
Soffer expects the extradition of Tahawwur Rana to play out swiftly, that once Rana is out of legal options, only political disputes or State Department snags could slow it down.
Overseas, Indian justice will take over. Generally there are no jury trials, and Rana is rightly concerned he might not make it to trial there.
Annually, dozens of prisoners are murdered and jails are "frequently life threatening," according to experts who say many and do not meet international standards.