New filings on detainees
on Dec 15, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Lawyers for detainees now in U.S. military custody on Friday filed letters in two federal appeals courts on the impact of the first court ruling on the court-stripping law enacted by Congress in October. The filings came in the Fourth Circuit Court, in a case involving a permanent resident alien taken prisoner inside the U.S. and now being held in a Navy brig in South Carolina, and in the D.C. Circuit Court, in two packets of cases on foreign nationals captured overseas and held at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In the Fourth Circuit case, Al-Marri v. Wright (06-7427), attorneys for Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri sought to use the ruling on Wednesday by U.S. District Judge James Robertson to support the Qatar native’s right to continue his challenge to capture and prolonged detention in military custody. The letter relied upon the part of Robertson’s ruling that the new Military Commissions Act of 2006 would be unconstitutional if it denied a permanent resident alien a right to pursue a habeas challenge to captivity. It cited this language from the opinion: “If and to the extent that the MCA operates to make the writ unavailable to a person whois constitutionally entitled to it, it must be unconstitutional.” (The letter can be found here.)
“The District Court…expressly agreed with al-Marri’s position that…an alien arrested and detained in this country, like al-Marri, is constitutionally entitled to habeas relief, and that the MCA would impermissibly suspend the Writ if construed to eliminate jurisdicgtion over his appeal.”
Attorneys for the Guantanamo detainees, in their letter to the D.C. Circuit, stressed differences between their cases and the case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan — the case in which Robertson ruled. They contended that the judge was wrong in his intepretation of the court-stripping provision. On the question of whether the Guantanamo detainees have a constitutional right to pursue habeas challenges to their continued detention, their lawyers said that Hamdan’s case is different because he faces a trial before a war crimes “military commission.” Most of the detainees at Guantanamo will not be charged with war crimes, the letter said, so they would have no opportunity to dchallenge their detentions in any court if the courts have lost jurisdiction. They also suggested that Robertson had misinterpreted the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Rasul v. Bush on detainees’ habeas rights.
This letter can be found here. The letter was a response to a Justice Department letter to the Circuit Court seeking to use Robertson’s ruling in the governments favor in the pending Circuit Court cases.
NOTE: Although the D.C. Circuit has been expected to rule promptly on the detainee cases, it did not do so among its rulings on Friday. The decision is still expected shortly.
