Let this be a lesson

A veteran civil rights lawyer was convicted Thursday of crossing the line by smuggling messages of violence from one of her jailed clients — a radical Egyptian sheik — to his terrorist disciples on the outside.

The jury deliberated 13 days over the past month before convicting Lynne Stewart, 65, a firebrand, left-wing activist known for representing radicals and revolutionaries in her 30 years on the New York legal scene.

The trial, which began last June, focused attention on the line between zealous advocacy and criminal behavior by a lawyer. Some defense lawyers saw the case as a government warning to attorneys to tread carefully in terrorism cases.

[...]

[Stewart] vowed to appeal and blamed the conviction on evidence that included videotape of Osama bin Laden urging support for her client. The defense protested the bin Laden evidence, and the judge warned jurors that the case did not involve the events of Sept. 11.

"When you put Osama bin Laden in a courtroom and ask the jury to ignore it, you're asking a lot," she said. "I know I committed no crime. I know what I did was right."

[...]

Stewart was the lawyer for Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind sheik sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for conspiring to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and destroy several New York landmarks, including the U.N. building and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.

[...]

Prosecutors said Stewart [...] carried messages between the sheik and senior members of an Egyptian-based terrorist organization, helping spread Abdel-Rahman's venomous call to kill those who did not subscribe to his extremist interpretation of Islamic law.

Prosecutor Andrew Dember argued that Stewart and her co-defendants essentially "broke Abdel-Rahman out of jail, made him available to the worst kind of criminal we find in this world — terrorists."

[...]

Stewart, who once represented Weather Underground radicals and mob turncoat Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, repeatedly declared her innocence, maintaining she was unfairly targeted by overzealous prosecutors.

But she also testified that she believed violence was sometimes necessary to achieve justice: "To rid ourselves of the entrenched, voracious type of capitalism that is in this country that perpetuates sexism and racism, I don't think that can come nonviolently." [Ed: Actually, that was something the prosecution picked out of a statement she made a long time ago in an American civil rights case - see later her interview.]

A major part of the prosecution's case was Stewart's 2000 release of a statement withdrawing the sheik's support for a cease-fire in Egypt by his militant followers. Prosecutors, though, could point to no violence that resulted from the statement.
  USA Today article

Lynne Stewart

The jury was anonymous and Ms. Stewart is facing a 20+-year sentence, which for her, will be the rest of her life.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called the verdict "an important step" in the war on terrorism.

"The convictions handed down by a federal jury in New York today send a clear, unmistakable message that this department will pursue both those who carry out acts of terrorism and those who assist them with their murderous goals," Gonzales said.
  USA Today article

It sends a clear message to us all.

I can't know what Lynne Stewart's intentions were. (Read the transcript or listen to her interview on Democracy Now, though, and get an idea.) But what I do know is that the laws we are now living under make that academic. We can now be caught in a trap simply by association, whether we intend to support terrorism or not. Remember the case of attorney Brandon Mayfield?

Attorney Elaine Cassell, in 2002, said about Stewart's case, "Ending, for all practical purposes, the right to counsel may be exactly what the Administration wants." In several articles, she explains the problem. Here are excerpts from three:

Federal prosecutors convinced the judge that the jurors will be anonymous, with the names known only, presumably, to the judge. Certainly the defense team or the defendant won't know their names, but I am taking bets that the prosecutors will.

Juror anonymity, which the government says it needs after the debacle in the recent hung jury in the Tyco case, is just the first step to secret trials--which the government already has successfully engineered in the case of deportations of immigrants post-September 11, 2001 and in several "terrorist" trials (some of which are so secret they don't even appear on a court docket anywhere).

Stewart was interviewed on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now on May 19. Listen to the interview. Then read the article setting out the new charges she is facing. Recall that last year, Judge Koetel dismissed the terrorism charges against her. [Ed: The judge said the charges were unconstitutionally vague and revealed a "lack of prosecutorial standards."] Not to be deterred, the government filed new terrorism charges, more vague and troublesome than the first. Call it Ashcroft's revenge.
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Then came 9/11--and the USA PATRIOT Act. The Act expanded "guilt by association" to the point that the most tenuous connection to an organization labeled by the Secretary of State as a "terrorist" organization can now lead to the charge of conspiring, or taking action to, give "material support" to "aid and abet" terrorism.

Was the expansion necessary? Sheik Abdel Rahman and others implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center attack and acts of violence on American embassies, as well as Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were tried and convicted before the 1996 and 2001 laws were enacted.

Was the expansion abusive? Consider recent indictments of defendants in Buffalo and Portland--which suggest that it is sufficient for the defendant simply to have been in the presence of people labeled as terrorist sympathizers, or to have given money to a non-profit organization that has (according to our government) mixed humanitarian and political activities associated with "terrorism." Consider, too, the indictment of Lynne Stewart, which I have discussed in a prior column, for what amounts to the "crime" of zealously representing a convicted terrorist.

The First Amendment consequences are dire, as Cole and Dempsey point out--given that there is no specific definition of "material support," no apparent intent requirement, and no ability on the part of defendants to question an organization's appearance on the list.

In light of this vagueness, most Muslim citizens and immigrants may reasonably believe that the course safest for their families is simply to avoid Muslim associations and organizations, period. And that is the tragedy: legitimate First Amendment activities have been criminalized, and even worse, criminalized so vaguely that the safest course would be to avoid exercising free speech rights at all.
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As every lawyer knows, client confidentiality is the very foundation of the attorney-client relationship. Attorney Lynne Stewart certainly believed that to be true, but her principles and zealous representation have landed her a four-count criminal indictment for aiding and abetting terrorism.

Without warning, Stewart was taken out of her home and arrested. Attorney General Ashcroft then staged a press conference within hours of her arrest. The same night, he appeared on David Letterman's show, to assure viewers (and potential jurors, it seems) that the "terrorist" lawyer was guilty as charged. [Emphasis mine, and shame on David Letterman for having Ashcroft on the show. That's entertainment, folks. Your right to a fair trial is entertainment only - no longer something seriously protecting you.]

The basis for the prosecution? Communications Stewart made with and about her client, a convicted terrorist for whom she was court-appointed counsel for his trial and whom she continued to represent in post-conviction matters.

Readers may wonder how Ashcroft learned of Stewart's supposedly confidential attorney-client communications in the first place. [.... There is a] so-called "crime-fraud" exception to the attorney-client privilege.

[...]

But there are other ways in which the government can be privy to attorney-client communications. Under a set of regulations called Special Administrative Measures (SAM), some incarcerated persons are forbidden from communicating not only with the outside world, but also with their lawyers on any topic that DOJ deems to be outside the scope of "legal representation."

What is outside the scope of legal representation? No one knows, and the DOJ is not saying.

[...]

U.S. citizen and New York City attorney Lynne Stewart is a criminal defense attorney with a career-long history of representing unpopular clients. For many of them, she is their court-appointed attorney.

Stewart does the kind of work, in short, that the ABA's Model Rules state that lawyers have a duty to do.

[...]

Stewart was a member of the court-appointed defense team for Sheik Abdel Rahman. Rahman is serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (His sentence was challenged on appeal, but affirmed.) Stewart continued to act as one of Rahman's attorneys after his incarceration.

[...]

[F]or over two years, his conversations with Stewart were wiretapped.

[...]

Ashcroft and his Justice Department issued the indictment. In addition to charging Stewart, it also charged a number of others: Mohammed Yousry, the Arabic language interpreter for communications between Stewart and Rahman; Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a resident of Staten Island, New York and described in the indictment as a "surrogate" for Rahman; and Yassir Al-Sirri, currently in custody in the United Kingdom.
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Americans sit here smugly allowing American-Arabs and Muslims to have their rights trompled, thinking they themselves are safe, because we have laws and lawyers in this country protecting our rights.

Uh-huh.

Update 10:30am: Via LaBelle: Too bad Lynne Stewart isn't a famous basketball star.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon says his mosque’s donations to groups the government later determined to be terrorist fronts were meant to help the poor, not sponsor terrorism.

A Houston mosque that Olajuwon established and supported gave more than $80,000 to groups the government has labeled fronts for al-Qaida and Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

[...]

Federal law enforcement officials said they were not investigating Olajuwon, a 7-foot center born in Nigeria who played 17 seasons for the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association before retiring in 2002.

  Columbia Tribune article