(Updates going on forever) Padilla Verdict: Guilty
By Mona
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The Bush Administration held this American citizen incommunicado for three and a half years without a lawyer, and tortured him, alleging he was a “dirty bomber.” The government dropped that extreme claim when a series of wrangles in federal court forced it to charge Padilla in criminal court, or let him go. A jury of Citizen Padilla’s peers in Miami federal court has convicted him of three charges involving conspiring to commit terrorism abroad and providing material support to terrorist organizations, according to my radio station.
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The normal procedures of American justice were finally allowed to work. There was never a reason to subject Citizen Padilla to anything less, all the prior excuses notwithstanding.
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Updates to be expected.
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Update:
AP:
MIAMI – Jose Padilla was convicted of federal terrorism support charges Thursday after being held for 3 1/2 years as an enemy combatant in a case that came to symbolize the Bush administration’s zeal to stop homegrown terror.
Padilla, a U.S. citizen from Chicago, was once accused of being part of an al-Qaida plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the U.S., but those allegations were not part of his trial..Padilla, 36, and his foreign-born co-defendants, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, were convicted of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas, which carries a penalty of life in prison. All three were also convicted of two terrorism material support counts, which carry potential 15-year sentences each.
Let me fix that first sentence: “Jose Padilla was convicted of federal terrorism support charges Thursday after being held for 3 1/2 years as an enemy combatant in a case that came to symbolize the Bush administration’s zeal to suspend the constitutional rights of counsel, of habeas corpus and a trial, and to torture a United States citizen.”
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Update II:
Steve Benen persuasively argues that the hideous abuse Padilla was subjected to should have been considered relevant to his ability to assist ion his own defense, that all of the original scary claims the govt spewed about Padilla turned out to be false, and that rewarding the govt with a conviction of a man it drove mad is a tragedy:
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick explained earlier this year that Padilla was kept for 1,307 days in a 9-foot-by-7-foot cell in a Navy brig in South Carolina, “where he says he was, among other things, deprived of sleep, light, sight, sound, shackled in stress positions, injected with ‘truth serum,’ and isolated for extended stretches of time.†This, not surprisingly, drove him mad, though prosecutors said he was faking mental illness. (Jack Balkin said a while back, “You can’t believe Padilla when he says we tortured him because he’s crazy from all the things we did to him.â€)….Prosecutors got their conviction, and the jury was persuaded by what they heard. But in this case, no one won and everyone lost.
But the torturing-unto-insanity issue ought to be superb grounds for appeal.
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Update III:
The only decent and intelligent thing Allahpundit at Malkin’s Hot Air blog had to say in bold:
A win too for Bush critics, in a sense: this will “prove†that the administration doesn’t need military tribunals to convict jihadis.
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Update IV:
Greenwald also notes that the original “flamboyant” claims of the govt against Padilla justifying its treatment of a U.S citizen were nowhere to be heard at trial, he thinks the torture to which Padilla was subjected creates grounds for skepticism of his ability defend himself and constitutes a good basis for appeal, and otherwise declares, my emphasis:
For a substantial time, Padilla was denied all access to the outside world, including even access to a lawyer. In court, the Bush DOJ repeatedly argued that the President possesses the power to imprison even U.S. citizens indefinitely and with no charges simply by decreeing them to be an “enemy combatant,” with no review of any kind and no opportunity to contest the validity of the accusations..The administration repeatedly contended that it was exercising this extraordinary and definitively tyrannical power — a power literally denied for centuries even to the British King – because it claimed that dangerous terrorists like Padilla could not be tried in a U.S. criminal court. Today’s verdict — along with scores of other terrorist convictions obtained with full due process rights both in the U.S. and other places, such as England — gives the lie to that claim....To this day, many people, including myself, cite the Padilla case as the ultimate wake-up call to the true character, the genuine soul, of the Bush administration. Imprisoning a U.S. citizen, on U.S. soil, with no charges of any kind, and then keeping him for years completely incommunicado, is just one of those lines which many people believed would never be crossed in America.
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Comment by Gary Farber —
August 16, 2007 @ 1:42 pm
Have a link.
Comment by x. trapnel —
August 16, 2007 @ 1:50 pm
“Finally allowed to work” is not exactly how I’d describe what little I’ve read of the trial.
I love this gem: “Padilla’s defense called no witnesses on his behalf and introduced no evidence. His lawyers adopted the risky strategy of suggesting to the jurors that prosecutors failed to prove he conspired with the others or provided material support to terrorists.”
Heh: the risky strategy of, you know, hoping the jurors can be shamed into remembering the actual burden of proof. Sigh.
Comment by Mona —
August 16, 2007 @ 2:40 pm
xtrapnel: Well, there is a big difference between lawyers choosing a risky defense strategy that one may certainly criticize, and the wheels of justice turning as they are supposed to in America. Professional incompetence or stupidity is not a constitutional or institutional failure. It is the professional failure, if it is that, of a few lawyers.
Comment by Nell —
August 16, 2007 @ 2:49 pm
Zeal.
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator —
August 16, 2007 @ 3:04 pm
Verdict reached in Padilla terror case
…
Jurors reached a verdict Thursday in the trial of Jose Padilla and two co-defendants charged with su…
Comment by Nell —
August 16, 2007 @ 3:07 pm
Marty Lederman invites us to consider the most revealing statement of this government’s detention and torture policy, the declaration filed in the Padilla case by Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The aim of such a cannot be to produce actionable intelligence, for it plainly does not do so. It is to demonstrate to the rest of us that U.S. citizens may be held indefinitely, their rights suspended, and their minds and spirits broken, at the say-so of the President alone.
Comment by X. Trapnel —
August 16, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
I wasn’t very clear, I’m afraid; too frustrated. What I meant is just that the idea that this is how things are *supposed to work* is more than a little sickening. I was reacting a bit to the “neither were jurors told that Padilla was held in a Navy brig for 3½ years without charges before his indictment in the Miami case” line in the CNN article. Now, on the one hand, one can imagine the standard proceduralist justifications for this … on the other, the idea that the only citizens allowed on the jury were those *unaware of a crucially important fact in our ongoing constitutional crisis* reminds me of Tocqueville’s remarks on how the jury often serves merely as a legitimating puppet for the authorities.
Comment by Mona —
August 16, 2007 @ 4:10 pm
I understand, and share your frustration. But it is possible Padilla did conspire to commit terrorism; he’d been under surveillance with wiretaps since the Clinton Administration as early as ‘93.
And maybe his lawyers royally fvcked up; I haven’t read enough yet to form a firm opinion on that, and there are decisions lawyers sometimes have to make with knowledge in mind we do not have and that they would be unwise (and even ethically bound) not to share.
But even if Padilla really is guilty of materially aiding terrorists, he is a goddam United States citizen, and what was done to him for 3.5 years is as antithetical to what this country is supposed to be as can be imagined.
An American citizen and physicist with the Manhattan Project named Ted Hall was known by the FBI by the late 40s to have spied and passed copious amounts of atomic secrets to Stalin. But the way they knew that was classified and they were not willing to let it be publicly known, and it also might have been inadmissible hearsay. So he died an old man with a long and fulfilling career, in 2001, never repentant and finally admitting he’d done it.
We didn’t just grab him and throw him in a dark prison without access to a lawyer and torture him. When he wouldn’t confess, the govt let him walk. It was unjust, but it was the American and right thing to do. If we could hold to the Constitution and our principles with Ted Hall, we surely can do so with the Jose Padillas of this world.
Comment by Scott F Fletcher —
August 16, 2007 @ 4:40 pm
mona-
In 1980, I personally was kept in a 9′ x 7′ cell for 327 days where I was (on occasion): deprived of sleep and light, “straight-jacketed” in ’stress positions’, injected with ‘phenobarbital’, isolated for extended stretches of time (the longest was 6 weeks), and specifically denied any opportunity to continue my education.
Of course, I was just a 15 yr old doing my time with the Ohio Youth Commission for a “B & E”(breaking and entering).
When are we going to hear about the “torture“?
Comment by Mona —
August 16, 2007 @ 4:44 pm
Scott: I completely believe you. It is not an accident that some of the Abu Ghraib sickos were “Corrections Officers” in civilian life. Prison atrocities are a major concern of mine, drowned out now only by the current other crises.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 16, 2007 @ 5:22 pm
I’m perfectly willing to believe Padilla was involved in some half-assed terrorist plotting.
However, I totally believe that his case should have been thrown out and he should have been released. This all makes me sick.
Comment by x. trapnel —
August 16, 2007 @ 6:08 pm
Scott, read this fuller explanation of what happened to him: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0814/p11s01-usju.html?page=1
… if you still think that this is an acceptable way to treat someone, I’m not sure what to say. And if genuinely comparable stuff was done to you for B&E, you have my sympathies. But I kind of doubt it was.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 16, 2007 @ 7:30 pm
After everything that’s happened to Padilla, including years of torture, it’s hard for me to conclude that he deserves any further punishment. I’m not saying that he really deserves anything good, but I don’t know that he deserves punishment either.
It’s also hard for me to conclude that he remains a threat. He has reportedly been rendered a basket case by torture. If so, he’s hardly competent to carry out an attack. Even if he isn’t a basket case, after the scrutiny he’s gotten I doubt he’d be able to get the trust or assistance of any other terrorist. The default assumption would be that he’s under surveillance.
That side, this was probably the least bad resolution of the case that we could hope for under the current circumstances: Although I haven’t examined all the facts of the case myself, from what I’ve heard he probably was involved in terrorism, and so a guilty verdict after an open trial is at least a correct course of action. Whether it’s a deserved course of action after the stuff that’s happened to him is another matter.
An acquittal, although arguably deserved, would have taken us to another crisis, because I seriously doubt that they would have let him go.
It’s sad that a legally correct but unjust verdict is the least bad scenario, because the alternative is another Constitutional crisis.
Comment by CaseyL —
August 16, 2007 @ 8:14 pm
That’s not sad; it’s maddening – because we can’t be sure of the outcome of a(nother) Constitutional crisis.
Or maybe we can: all the previous ones have been decided in the Bush Admin’s favor. And with Alito and Roberts on the SCOTUS, we can’t even put any faith in an appeal that goes that high.
Comment by Mona —
August 16, 2007 @ 8:29 pm
Actually no, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which Scalia helped the majority by dissenting to the “left,” is Golden.
Comment by Nell —
August 17, 2007 @ 8:56 am
Likewise Hamdan in June of 2006. Though Congress promptly undid most of the good of that decision by “fixing” the law to cover the rear ends of the war criminals in the regime.
Comment by Fraud Guy —
August 17, 2007 @ 3:55 pm
I found this on talkleft.com (http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/7/3/225654/0947), that the jurors came in in coordinated red, white, and blue outfits by row for July 4th.
Now I like patriotic displays and fireworks, but having the jurors in a “terror” trial make this kind of display makes me wonder how long this verdict was planned.
To me it would be like a juror in a trial about a hate crime against a homosexual wearing a rainbow flag shirt (or pin) to the courtroom. The defense would probably have them excluded for bias.
Comment by Mona —
August 17, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
Fraud Guy: for all the reasons you describe, as well as how quickly the verdict was rendered, I am pretty sure Padilla lost his case at the point of jury selection. I doubt much mattered after that.
Comment by Fraud Guy —
August 18, 2007 @ 12:43 am
Mona,
After reading some of the evidence presented, I would have to agree.
I guess I am biased; when I served on a jury, we weighed the evidence after both sides rested, and decided that there was more than a reasonable doubt about the defendant’s guilt.
We heard about 3 hours of testimony, and took about an hour to reach a verdict. Parsing through three months of vague evidence in about a day pretty much leaves the “government said he did it, that’s good for me” as the logic chain here.
Or maybe they had summer vacation plans before school started.