[lbo-talk] Slate: David Feige's summary of the Lynne Stewart trial

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue Feb 15 13:46:44 PST 2005


URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2113446/

Posted Monday, Feb. 14, 2005, at 2:04 PM PT

Slate

jurisprudence The law, lawyers, and the court.

Radical Sheik

An elegy for radical lawyering.

By David Feige

In a spacious courtroom on Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan, a jury

just did an unfortunate thing. It convicted Lynne Stewart, a radical

lawyer, of charges that she aided and abetted terrorists.

I know Lynne Stewart--I saw her many times in the well-worn hallways

of Bronx Supreme Court, arguing cases on behalf of poor, mostly

unknown clients. She had an impressive bearing, burnished by her years

of defending radicals and the occasional mobster. Stewart was a

compelling combination of warm and fierce--a woman possessed of both

great compassion and real principle.

Her troubles began over a dozen years ago when she undertook the

representation of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric convicted

in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The

sheik, convicted of conspiracy in 1995 along with nine other people,

was eventually sentenced to life and imprisoned in a

solitary-confinement cell in Minnesota. He was also subjected to

highly restrictive "special administrative measures"--designed by the

government to silence those whose views or knowledge or influence it

considers dangerous.

Despite his conviction, Ms. Stewart continued to advocate for the

sheik. But in order to meet with him in prison, she had to sign an

agreement abiding by the terms of those SAMs--among them a prohibition

against presenting the sheik's views in public. Stewart needed to see

her client. She signed the forms.

The problem was that at some point in her representation, Stewart

decided that the only way to ameliorate the sheik's sentence and the

terms of his confinement was to keep his case in the public eye in the

hopes that he'd be allowed to serve out his sentence in Egypt. Stewart

faced a difficult situation--the right thing for her client was

something the government had made her promise not to do. But in

Stewart's mind, the client came first. She called the press.

As a result of that call, Ms. Stewart was herself indicted and charged

with lying to the government (for violating the conditions of the

SAMs) and with providing material aid to terrorism. Essentially, her

decision to advocate for the sheik by talking to the press in order to

keep his case in the spotlight was what was on trial. According to the

government, by making those statements Stewart herself became part of

a terrorist conspiracy.

Imagine spending six months of your life sitting in a courtroom, on

trial for what amounts to your life (Ms. Stewart, already 65 years old

and a grandmother, now faces spending the rest of her life in prison).

It's the kind of experience that, win or lose, makes you never, ever

want to mess with the government again. And that is both the point and

the problem: Her indictment alone had had a chilling effect on defense

attorneys, and the conviction may well mean the government gets what

it really wants--a docile defense bar that refuses to touch terrorism

cases for fear of themselves becoming targets.

Her trial was a monster--six months and nearly 90,000 tape-recorded

calls to home phones and cell phones around the world, all culled and

analyzed for hints of Stewart's complicity. The tapes didn't really

show much. After all, the government couldn't show that anything bad

had happened as a result of the press conference, nor could they link

Stewart to any global ring of terrorists or act of terror. But

unfortunately for Stewart, the government had more than just the phone

calls--it had fear. During the course of the trial, prosecutors played

a pre-9/11 videotape in which Osama Bin Laden threatens to attack the

United States as a means of winning the sheik's release from prison.

This, despite the fact that--as the judge pointed out--Bin Laden was

never a part of the case against Ms. Stewart.

Still, the "fear card" had been dealt, both in jury selection, by

picking an anonymous (and thus terrified) jury, and then built upon in

the invocation of Bin Laden and Sept. 11. That, along with what, on

its face, seems a clear violation of the SAMs was enough to persuade

the jury to convict Ms. Stewart on all the charges against her. And

that's a tragedy for all of us.

Make no mistake about it--the Stewart trial was just a small battle in

a larger culture war. At issue is our tolerance for radical dissent,

and at stake is the traditional role of the defense lawyer as zealous

advocate and anointed spokesman for the interests of the prosecuted.

By allowing the government to transubstantiate client access into that

lawyer's own silence, the jury has dealt a blow to radical points of

view everywhere. The list of people the government has considered

seditious and dangerous over the years is long and frightening in its

breadth. By validating the use of SAMs to silence lawyers, the jury

has effectively silenced a whole class of inmates that the government

alone gets to define. And in an age in which that same government

argues to the Supreme Court for the power to detain suspects without

charges and institutes policies designed to better leverage lax

torture standards in other countries, the squelching of dissent--and,

more perniciously, the squelching of those who represent

dissenters--is a dangerous and unsettling precedent.

What the Stewart jury effectively did was to criminalize radical

lawyering. And while that may be a great victory for the government in

its fight against radicalism and the lure of terrorist ideas, our

nation has always thrived on the notion that nothing defeats evil and

seditious ideas quite like better ideas--that open and engaged debate

and public denunciations of evil are always better than a government

that dictates which ideas are acceptable and which will be silenced.

There aren't a lot of people willing to forgo the easy riches that

come with a law degree to do the tough and unpopular work of defending

indigent, reviled clients. And there are even fewer who are both good

at it and passionate about it. Lynne Stewart was of those few. She'd

take any case--the tougher the better, and unlike so many others, she

never did it for the money and she always did it well. And while the

30 years she spent in the trenches made her great in the eyes of the

poor and the despised, and an inspiration to young lawyers getting

their first taste of the bitter dish the government serves up to those

it prosecutes, it also made her a perfect target for a bully

government looking to re-draw the lines of appropriate advocacy.

Lynne Stewart's conviction sends the strong message that, where

terrorism is concerned, our citizens may no longer accept the vigorous

defense of unpopular people. Unfortunately, it means something else,

too--that the terror about terrorism has yet to give way to

rationality. Merely flaunting pictures of Osama Bin Laden may be

enough to justify any policy or convict any defendant. But as Lynne

herself might have said, as scary as Osama Bin Laden might be, the

only greater terror than terrorism is a society that abandons the

principles that protect us all.

David Feige, a public defender in the Bronx and a Soros Media Justice

Fellow, is the author of the book _Indefensible_, to be published in

2005.



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