Ok, so obviously this guy is no saint, but it seems extremely dubious what happened to him. He was living in Russia, then the DEA (wtf?) set up a sting operation to get him to agree to sell some weapons to a Colombian terrorist group, a group that Bout had never had any prior connection with. After he finally goes along with it, the USA then get Thailand to arrest and extradite him from there, then he is held for 4 years in a US prison, much of it in solitary confinement, before his trial (so much for a 'swift and speedy trial' as mandated in the constitution). The solitary was later ruled unconstitutional by a US judge. The judge at the trial said there was no evidence that Bout intended to harm any American citizens or ever had done so, and that there was no evidence he had intended to commit the 'crime' in question until the DEA set up its sting operation and tried repeatedly to lure him into it. Finally, the prosecutors charged him with selling weapons to dictators to use against their own people, something the US government has done for decades, and continues to do to this very day, on a scale far exceeding that which Mr Bout has ever managed. It seems to me that in this case, the US government have sent an agency tasked with drug enforcement to entrap and persuade a foreign citizen by inventing an arms dealing sting, thus creating a 'crime' where none would otherwise have existed; then arrested a foreign citizen in a foreign country for an alleged crime which would have taken place in another foreign country; then breaking their own constitution by imprisoning someone on remand in inhumane conditions and waiting 4 years to try him; and for an alleged crime which the very same government has committed itself on far greater scale dozens of times over the decades. That seems rather fishy, to say the least.
I don't know if it is the same story but I recall reading about some guy held in jail for 4 years without a trial and he was eventually released and awarded several million dollars by the courts.