2008 ANNUAL REPORT - National Lawyers Guild

Political Prisoners
The Guild advocated publicly this
past year for justice in several longstanding
political cases. Dr. Sami-Al
Arian, who was arrested on charges
of aiding terrorism in 2003, was released on bail
in early September for the first time since his
arrest. Although a Florida jury in 2006 refused
to find him guilty of a single count of the 17
charges against him, the federal prosecutor continued
to hold him in punitive detention and
to violate their no-cooperation agreement by
calling Al-Arian before several grand juries.
Past NLG president Peter Erlinder, Al-Arian’s
counsel in the 4th and 11th Circuit Courts of
Appeal, said of this practice: “The duplicity of
the Justice Department and the failure of the
courts to recognize basic contract-law principles
in this case is an example of how politically-motivated
‘war on terror’ prosecutions are distorting
the American legal system.” Al-Arian, who
was under house arrest, faces pending criminal
contempt charges for refusing to appear before
the grand jury. Defense attorneys filed a petition
for habeas corpus with the court, challenging
his continued unlawful detention by Immigration
and Customs Enforcement.
The Guild believes that politics also influenced
the June 5 federal appeals court decision
upholding the convictions of five Cuban
patriots accused of spying in the United States.
The so-called Cuban Five gathered information
on U.S.-based exile groups planning terrorist
actions against their island nation and submitted
their findings to the FBI a decade ago. In
turn, the government arrested them, meting out
harsh prison sentences, including life terms. Despite
lack of any evidence against the Five, two
judges on a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit
Court of Appeals upheld the most serious
charges. The Guild has submitted amicus briefs
in the case of the Five, a case on which longtime
member Len Weinglass is an attorney. The NLG
has organized many educational events on this
political influences that resulted in the Five’s
convictions.
In late March, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal v.
Martin Horn. In a 118-page written decision,
two of the three judges denied the defense’s
Batson v. Kentucky claim, namely that the prosecution
was motivated by racial discrimination
when it struck blacks from the panel of prospective
jurors. Dissenting from the opinion, Justice
Thomas Ambro questioned why the court chose
this case to announce a new procedural requirement
and wrote that he would have ordered a
hearing and required the prosecution to explain
its challenges of black jury panelists. “It is
merely to take the next step in deciding whether
race was impermissibly considered during jury
selection in this case,” he wrote.
Executive Director Heidi Boghosian said, “This
decision is a somber reminder that the criminal
justice system has been unable to eradicate the
continuing impacts of racism. Despite evidence
that racial bias influenced all stages of Mumia
Abu-Jamal’s trial and appeals, an award-winning
journalist has been denied the chance to prove
the extent to which overt racial animus colored
his day in court.”