Detainee cases begin to move
on Jul 1, 2008 at 8:24 pm
UPDATE Wednesday 10:30 a.m.
The District judges’ resolution adopted Tuesday on processing more than 250 current or soon-to-be-filed Guantanamo habeas cases can be downloaded here. A sample order for transferring a case to the coordinating judge is here. A press release issued Wednesday, describing the judges’ action and noting the expected challenge to the war crimes military commission system, can be read here. The assignment to Senior Judge Thomas F. Hogan is mainly to sort out common procedural issues, although he may also identify and rule on substantive legal issues, the judges said. Judge Hogan’s first hearing is next Tuesday at 2 p.m.
Federal District judges in Washington, D.C., who will handle scores of pending and likely future challenges by Guantanamo Bay detainees to their confinement, decided on Monday to shift them temporarily to one judge to work on ways to process the cases. Attorneys for detainees began receiving notices Tuesday that the judges, in a closed-door session earlier in the day, had agreed that Senior District Judge Thomas F. Hogan would handle “coordination and management” issues. The underlying cases will remain with the individual judges for future action on the merits. A typical order transferring a case to Judge Hogan can be read here.
The judges acted after holding two meetings with lawyers for the detainees and for the Justice Department, to explore what could be done to make the processing of the habeas challenges more efficient.
Meanwhile, an attorney for a detainee facing a war crimes trial at Guantanamo said he will file a challenge to try to stop those proceedings before a Pentagon military commission at the base on the island of Cuba. Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal said he would begin that challenge promptly.
Developments on detainee cases have been speeding up in the two and a half weeks since the Supreme Court, on June 12, ruled that the detainees have a constitutional right to file habeas petitions to contest the military’s detention and continued confinement of them.
That ruling applied directly to individuals not yet facing any war crimes or other criminal charges, but Professor Katyal’s client — Yemeni national Salim Ahmed Hamdan — will be seeking to apply that ruling to his own case. As of now, his trial at Guantanamo is scheduled to begin July 21. The D.C. Circuit Court refused on May 15 to order a delay of the trial, but that was before the Supreme Court ruled on detainees’ rights. The Circuit Court said its action was “without prejudice” to renewing the plea for delay, once the Supreme Court had ruled.
The District judges are now free to move ahead with all of the other habeas cases, since the Circuit Court has issued orders sending back to the judges the collection of cases that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling last month. In orders dated June 25, the D.C. Circuit Court, without waiting for lawyers to ask for it, sent the cases titled Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. U.S., along with some two dozen similar cases, back to District Court judges to follow up on the Supreme Court’s decision.
The Justices’ ruling is now known generally simply by the Boumediene case’s name. In its two orders, the Circuit Court issued immediately its mandate returning the cases to District Court “for further proceedings consistent with the Supreme Court’s opinion in Boumediene v. Bush.”
Since the detainees in those cases have not been charged with any crimes, their reopened habeas challenges will be aimed at the initial military decisions to hold them prisoners — decisions made by the Pentagon’s three-member Combatant Status Review Tribunals.
Meanwhile, the Circuit Court, in an order issued June 26, sent back to District Court the habeas challenge by lawyers for war crimes defendant Hamdan. Further proceedings in that case may reveal how the Boumediene decision by the Justices is going to impact on the war crimes trials of Hamdan and others.
