« Sanctimonious politician alert | Main | Crisis of faith »
October 17, 2006
A slap on the wrist
Imagine an America-hating, treasonous coddler of murderers dedicated to destroying the United States, someone who loathes everything about the capitalist system and the nation most identified with destroying the Soviet Union.
Then take that person and picture that misshapen, twisted psyche encased in a body as ugly and twisted as its belief system, and you have Lynne Stewart, the defense attorney who fought tooth and nail to free the blind sheik from the U.S. legal system.
She was convicted by a jury of deliberately violating prohibitions on the convicted terrorist from communicating with his fellow killers on the outside. Stewart helped him continue his role as a leader of a terrorist organization. One of her co-conspirators was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
What did she get?
Let Andy McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. Attorney who convicted the blind sheik, tell you.
For an offense the point of which was to inspire proven savages to ignore the self-imposed restraints of a truce and begin killing again, Stewart was sentenced to a prison term of 28 months — not years, months.
This is inexplicable.
Given the mitigating factors of Stewart’s age (67) and medical condition (recovering from breast cancer), there was certainly an argument for a less severe sentence than the 30 years the government was urging. But anything less than ten years under these circumstances mocks the gravity of terrorism offenses at a time when terrorism is our top-tier national-security challenge. Indeed, even ten years would have been generous.
[...]
Stewart was convicted of providing material support to terrorists — specifically, of providing the Egyptian Islamic Group (Gamaat al Islamia, one of the world’s most barbaric terrorist organizations and an al Qaeda ally) with the guidance of its leader, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who was otherwise unable to communicate with the outside world due to the sentence of life imprisonment he is serving for leading a terrorist conspiracy in the U.S. (the case I prosecuted).
And we are not talking here about just any kind of support. The message she conveyed was that Abdel Rahman no longer supported the Islamic Group’s ceasefire in Egypt. Translation: Let’s get back to slaughtering innocents, like we did in the 1997 Luxor massacre, in which the Islamic Group brutally killed nearly 60 tourists, inserting into some of the mutilated corpses pamphlets demanding the blind sheikh’s release.
Stewart was not a babe in the woods. She defended anti-American radicals her entire career. She was not an attorney for the Legal Aid Society or the federal panel of lawyers who routinely take on the representation of indigent defendants in any kind of case, no matter how trivial. She was, instead, a self-styled “political” lawyer — an outsider who volunteered to represent, as she put it, “unpopular” clients.
[...]
Stewart defended the blind sheikh through a ten-month trial in which she dealt, again and again, with his calls for massive killing of infidels, especially Jews and Americans. In her summation to the jury, arguing about allegations that the sheikh had solicited and conspired to accomplish the murder of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, she contended not that he was innocent but that the jury should see him as a “freedom fighter” who sought to displace the secular Egyptian regime “by any means necessary.”
Lynne Stewart knew what this was about. It was about murder. That the Islamic Group has apparently not acted on the sheikh’s instructions (at least, that we know of) is more a miracle — or a tactical respite — than a point in her favor.
And speaking of tactics, it is noteworthy that Lynne executed the standard defense sentencing playbook masterfully — and with great success. She affected contrition for what she portrayed as mistakes of judgment (not real crimes, of course), and pleaded with the sentencing judge to be lenient because she had already suffered enough with the loss of her precious law license. “The end of my career truly is like a sword in my side,” the New York Times reports her as plying the court’s heartstrings. ”Permit me to live out the rest of my life productively, lovingly, righteously.”
So what happened once she got the much sought after slap-on-the-wrist? Why, she marched right outside the courthouse and defiantly proclaimed: “This is a great victory against an overreaching government. I hope the government realizes their error, because I am back out ... [a]nd I am staying out until after an appeal that I hope will vindicate me, that I hope will make me back into the lawyer that I was.”
Translation: Despite my conviction, I won and the government lost. And once the appeals court fixes things, my conviction will be gone and I’ll be right back in business.
And what about the cancer, which sentencing judge John Koeltl also relied on to rationalize his ill-conceived beneficence? The Times relates that the “feisty” Stewart — sounding a lot more like a professional crook than a professional lawyer — brayed that if it eventually comes down to serving the 28 months, “I could do it standing on my head.” Apparently, she’s feeling better.
What a disgusting example of how our criminal justice system works -- or more properly, fails to work.
Posted by Mike Lief at October 17, 2006 01:06 PM
| TrackBack
Comments
This makes my stomach churn. I heard about this last night I the Savage Nation, Mike Savages' radio show. I hope that when it goes to appeal, that she raises enough of a fuss about it, that it backfires on her, and she gets a tougher sentence.
Posted by: Sean Nunley at October 17, 2006 05:24 PM