History > 2007 > USA > Federal Justice (II)

Mark Streeter

Georgia        The Savannah Morning News        5.7.2007

Judge: FBI Helped Frame 4 in 1965 Murder

July 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:51 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BOSTON (AP) -- A federal judge Thursday ordered the government to pay more than $101 million in the case of four men who spent decades in prison for a 1965 murder they didn't commit after the FBI withheld evidence of their innocence.

The FBI encouraged perjury, helped frame the four men and withheld for more than three decades information that could have cleared them, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner said in issuing her ruling Thursday.

She called the government's argument that the FBI had no duty to get involved in the state case ''absurd.''

Peter Limone, Joseph Salvati and the families of the two other men who died in prison had sued the federal government for malicious prosecution.

They argued that Boston FBI agents knew mob hitman Joseph ''The Animal'' Barboza lied when he named the men as killers in the 1965 death of Edward Deegan. They said Barboza was protecting a fellow FBI informant, Vincent ''Jimmy'' Flemmi, who was involved.

The four men convicted on Barboza's lies were treated as ''acceptable collateral damage'' because the FBI's priority at the time was taking down the Mafia, their attorneys said.

A Justice Department lawyer had argued that federal authorities couldn't be held responsible for the results of a state prosecution and had no duty to share information with the officials who prosecuted Limone, Salvati, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco.

''The FBI's misconduct was clearly the sole cause of this conviction,'' the judge said Thursday. ''The government's position is, in a word, absurd.''

''No lost liberty is dispensable. We have fought wars over this principle. We are still fighting these wars,'' Gertner told the packed courtroom.

Salvati and Limone were exonerated in 2001 after FBI memos dating back to the Deegan case surfaced, showing the men had been framed by Barboza. The memos were made public during a Justice Department task force probe of the FBI's relationship with gangsters and FBI informants James ''Whitey'' Bulger and Stephen ''The Rifleman'' Flemmi.

Limone, now 73, and Salvati, 75, stared straight ahead as the judge announced her ruling. A gasp could be heard from the area where their friends and family were sitting when Gertner said how much the government would be forced to pay.

The men's attorneys had not asked for a specific amount in damages, but in court documents they cited other wrongful conviction cases in which $1 million was awarded for every year of imprisonment. Gertner ordered the government to pay $101.7 million.

''Do I want the money? Yes, I want my children, my grandchildren to have things I didn't have, but nothing can compensate for what they've done,'' Salvati said.

Salvati had been sentenced to life in prison as an accessory to murder and served more than 29 years before his sentence was commuted in 1997.

''It's been a long time coming,'' said Limone, who served 33 years in prison before he was freed in 2001. ''What I've been through -- I hope it never happens to anyone else.''

Justice Department lawyer Bridget Bailey Lipscomb declined immediate comment on the ruling.

    Judge: FBI Helped Frame 4 in 1965 Murder, NYT, 26.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wrongful-Convictions.html

Court Voids Higher Limits on Truckers’ Hours

July 25, 2007
The New York Times
By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON, July 24 — A federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down a Bush administration rule that loosened limits on the work hours of truck drivers, concluding that officials had failed to offer adequate justification for the changes.

In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the federal agency that oversees the trucking industry had not provided enough evidence to demonstrate the safety of its 2005 decision to increase the maximum driving hours of truck drivers. The hours were increased to 77 from 60 over 7 consecutive days, and to 88 hours from 70 over 8 days.

The court found that the agency, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, had ignored the results of a study, which it had commissioned, involving a database of more than 50,000 truck accidents from 1991 to 2002. Using the data, the study extrapolated a substantially higher risk of fatigue-related accidents in the extra hours of service allowed by the new rules.

The agency, part of the Transportation Department, “failed to provide an adequate explanation for its decision to adopt the 11-hour daily driving limit,” the court said.

The new rules had been adopted after heavy lobbying by politically influential leaders of the trucking industry. They were part of a broader strategy by the Bush administration to reduce regulations on businesses.

Safety experts and insurance analysts challenged the changes. They said longer driving hours had contributed to a high number of truck accidents. About 100 people die each week in truck-related accidents, making the industry America’s most treacherous as measured by deaths and injuries to truckers, drivers of other vehicles and pedestrians.

Supporters of the loosened standards say they have made it faster and cheaper to move goods across the country. They say that the changes promoted safety and that shorter hours would force the industry to put more drivers with little experience behind the wheel. And they note that the fatality rate in truck-related accidents — the number of deaths per miles traveled — has continued a long decline.

Still, the rate remains nearly double that for accidents involving only cars, and the Bush administration has repeatedly missed its own targets for reducing truck-related fatalities.

The decision on Tuesday, in a case filed by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, was the third in three years bringing judicial criticism down on the motor carrier agency.

A different appeals panel criticized the agency in December 2005 for failing to issue adequate rules for the training of drivers, saying it had ignored its own studies on a need for more comprehensive training.

And in 2004, a third panel of the appeals court struck down new hours-of-service rules that were virtually identical to those at issue in Tuesday’s decision, saying they had been “arbitrary and capricious.”

After Congress, at the urging of the Bush administration and the trucking industry, intervened to block the enforcement of the 2004 court order, the motor carrier agency issued the 2005 rules. At the time, the agency said it had addressed the concerns raised by the appeals court’s 2004 decision.

In a regulatory impact analysis accompanying the 2005 changes, the agency concluded that the economic costs to the industry of tightening the hours-of-service rules, as consumer groups had proposed, outweighed the safety benefits. But the court said Tuesday that the analysis was flawed. The opinion was written by Judge Merrick B. Garland and signed by Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg and Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson.

Safety groups hailed the ruling.

“The court is saying once again, no,” said Jacqueline S. Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an alliance of consumer, health and insurance organizations. “For three and a half years this agency has tried every which way to defend a rule that would result in longer consecutive driver hours and longer total work hours. This has a dramatic dangerous impact on the lives of truck drivers and on the lives of everyone sharing the roads with trucks. And once again the court has said, ‘No, you cannot go ahead with a rule when it violates the law and you clearly have not justified it.’ ”

The agency would not say whether it would appeal the decision or seek a stay of the court’s order, which is to take effect in September.

“We are analyzing the decision issued today to understand the court’s findings as well as determine the agency’s next steps to prevent driver fatigue, ensure safe and efficient motor carrier operations and save lives,” a statement issued by the agency said.

The American Trucking Associations, which defended the changes to the rules in the proceeding, said it would ask the court to stay its ruling to give the agency time to provide a better justification of the changes.

    Court Voids Higher Limits on Truckers’ Hours, NYT, 25.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/washington/25truck.html

New Court to Address California Prison Crowding

July 24, 2007
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE

LOS ANGELES, July 23 — Two federal judges took a major step toward solving California’s prison overcrowding crisis by issuing orders on Monday to create a three-judge court that will be charged with reducing the number of state inmates.

In separate orders, Judges Thelton E. Henderson and Lawrence K. Karlton, both of Federal District Court, argued that overcrowding in California’s prisons had thwarted federal court interventions to address the lack of health care and that state responses had been inadequate.

The orders must be considered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, which will decide whether to combine the cases under one panel or to create two panels. If the courts do impose a population cap on the California prison system, it will be the first time the federal courts have taken such strong action against a state correctional agency.

“The court therefore believes that a three-judge court should consider whether a prisoner release order is warranted,” wrote Judge Henderson, who is overseeing a class-action lawsuit seeking to provide adequate medical care to prisoners.

With 173,453 prisoners as of June 2006, California’s prison population is the country’s largest and is among the nation’s most overcrowded. Some facilities are at 210 percent of their designed capacity.

The orders are a major blow to California legislators and to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently signed into law a $7.7 billion prison construction bill. The law creates space for a major expansion of the prison population, with an additional 12,000 prison beds by 2009 and 8,000 medical and mental health beds. It also authorizes the transfer of 8,000 prisoners to out-of-state facilities.

But the judges argued that without money for staff members, new rehabilitation programs and other critically underfinanced and understaffed areas, the prison population would continue to grow at unsustainable levels.

“From all that presently appears,” said Judge Karlton, who is overseeing a mental health care class-action lawsuit against the prison system, “new beds will not alleviate this problem but will aggravate it.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said the state would follow through with construction plans and out-of-state prison transfers, even as it planned to appeal the decisions.

“I’m confident that the steps the state has taken and will continue taking to reduce overcrowding will meet the court’s concerns,” he said in a statement. “At the same time, we intend to appeal these orders to ensure that dangerous criminals are not released into our communities.”

The orders will now be considered by the chief justice of the Ninth Circuit, Judge Mary M. Schroeder, who will make the final decision about the creation of the panels.

Michael Bien, a lawyer who argued a class-action lawsuit on behalf of prisoners seeking constitutionally adequate mental health care resources, said the three-judge panel could either order the state to fix its own problems or create a special federal trustee to do the job directly.

“They will have to determine what is the constitutionally permissible population level in California given how many prison cells and beds we have, how many doctors and clinicians we have,” Mr. Bien said. “Obviously, it’s going to be less than we have now, but the question is, Is it 5,000 less or 50,000 less or somewhere between, and once you establish that how do you get there?”

The judges recommended that the state continue working on ways to reform the prison system as the special court was established and suggested reforms to rehabilitation and parole programs as ways to reduce the number of parole violators now flooding the prison system.

    New Court to Address California Prison Crowding, NYT, 24.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/us/24calif.html

Cheney Wins Dismissal of Suit Brought by Valerie Wilson

July 20, 2007
The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, July 19 — A federal district judge on Thursday dismissed a civil suit brought by Valerie Wilson and her husband seeking damages from Vice President Dick Cheney, his former chief of staff and two others for the disclosure of Ms. Wilson’s role as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The judge, John D. Bates, said that while the suit raised “important questions relating to the propriety of actions taken by our highest government officials,” there was no statutory or constitutional way for the plaintiffs to obtain damages.

Ms. Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, maintained that the disclosure was punishment for Mr. Wilson’s public assertions, based largely on a trip he took to Africa for the C.I.A., that the Bush administration had justified the invasion of Iraq by distorting intelligence about Iraqi efforts to acquire unconventional weapons. The leak, the suit said, prematurely ended Ms. Wilson’s career with the agency and put the entire Wilson family in danger.

Defenders of the administration have said it had a legitimate interest in rebutting Mr. Wilson’s criticism, partly by raising with reporters the question of whether it was his wife, as an employee of the C.I.A., who had gotten him the Africa assignment.

Judge Bates’s opinion carefully recounted the events behind the case, including discussions of Ms. Wilson’s identity by the four defendants: Mr. Cheney; I. Lewis Libby Jr., then the vice president’s chief of staff; Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state; and Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior political adviser.

In granting a motion to dismiss the suit, the judge said laws enacted to deal with such leaks, like the Privacy Act, explicitly omitted the possibility of civil suits for violations.

Further, government officials generally cannot be sued for acts they undertake in the performance of their public duties, and Judge Bates suggested that contrary to the suit’s assertion, the defendants had not acted outside the scope of their official tasks.

Though the way they sought to discredit Mr. Wilson may have been “highly unsavory,” the judge said, “there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration’s handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants’ duties as high-level executive branch officials.”

A lawyer for the Wilsons, Melanie Sloan, said they were likely to appeal.

“While we are obviously very disappointed by today’s decision,” Ms. Sloan said, “we have always expected that this case would ultimately be decided by a higher court.”

    Cheney Wins Dismissal of Suit Brought by Valerie Wilson, NYT, 20.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/washington/20plame.html

In Mississippi, Ruling Is Seen as Racial Split

July 18, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

JACKSON, Miss., July 13 — A federal court ruling in June that forces voters to register by party could return Mississippi to the days of racially polarized politics, as many white Democrats warn that thousands of white voters will now opt definitively for the Republican Party.

Republican-leaning voters in Mississippi have long been able to cross party lines in primaries, voting for centrist Democrats in state and local races while staying loyal to Republican candidates in national races. But political experts here say that by limiting these voters — almost all of whom are white — to Republican primaries, the ruling will push centrist Democratic candidates to the other party, simply in order to survive.

Most black voters in Mississippi are Democrats, and black political leaders have been pushing for years to prevent crossover voting in Democratic primaries. Black leaders say they want to end precisely what white Democrats here seek to preserve, a strong moderate-to-conservative voice in the Democratic Party, and in the process to pick up more state and local posts.

The ruling last month by Judge W. Allen Pepper Jr. of Federal District Court allowed the legal remedy sought by black leaders. Judge Pepper said the Democratic Party in Mississippi had a right to “disassociate itself” from voters who were not genuine Democrats. Most other Southern states also have open primaries.

As a result of the ruling, which was handed down June 8 and barring an appeal will go into effect next year, few whites are likely to remain in the Democratic Party, experts here say, a prospect that Republicans regard with glee, white Democrats with horror and black leaders with indifference. Not for the first time in the South, Republicans and blacks have achieved a de facto unspoken alliance of common interests that has been particularly evident in the drawing of Congressional districts, where blacks are packed into majority-black districts, leaving little space for moderate white Democrats to be elected.

If white voters go Republican in these districts, so too, will white candidates and office-holders, ending a persistent anomaly in a state that easily went twice for President Bush but where hundreds of local officeholders remain Democrats. As elsewhere in the South, grass-roots leaders tend to be moderate Democrats with roots in the New Deal.

The governor is a Republican, and Republicans narrowly control the Senate. But the House is heavily Democratic, and in races this year for local offices like sheriff, supervisor and circuit clerk, about 2,500 of 3,000 candidates were Democrats, said W. Martin Wiseman, director of the John C. Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University.

The Democrats’ dominance at the local level may now be threatened by Judge Pepper’s ruling.

“If they are required to re-register, the Democratic Party will be a shell of its former self because I just don’t think you’ll see those conservative whites re-register as Democratic,” said Jere Nash, who is white and a veteran consultant and onetime chief of staff to former Gov. Ray Mabus, a Democrat.

R. Andrew Taggart, a white lawyer who succeeded Mr. Nash when Kirk Fordice, a Republican, was elected governor, agreed. The ruling was “very far-reaching,” Mr. Taggart said. “He has essentially ruled our entire primary structure must be changed.”

“If forced to make a decision,” Mr. Taggart added, “a plurality of Mississippi voters will identify themselves as Republican.”

Black Democrats who pushed the lawsuit that led to the ruling seemed to view the potential hemorrhaging of white voters with equanimity. One of their leaders is Ike Brown, a state Democratic executive committee member who was recently found by another federal judge to have systematically violated voting rights of whites, through intimidation and other means, as party boss in his home county, Noxubee, in the eastern part of the state.

Welcoming Judge Pepper’s ruling, Mr. Brown said in an interview: “We are tired of being abused by the white Democrats in Mississippi. We have just had enough. We want the Republicans out of our party.”

Democrats here have recently made other efforts to rid their party of Republican leanings, trying, for instance, to force the state’s conservative insurance commissioner, George Dale, off their primary ballot because he voted for Mr. Bush. A judge put Mr. Dale back on.

But none of these efforts have much chance at being as successful as the lawsuit. Ellis Turnage, the lawyer who filed it, said he was not worried about whites’ quitting the party. “If they want to leave, let them leave,” Mr. Turnage said. “When they integrated the schools, look what happened. That’s not for me to deal with.”

Yet if that happens, the racial polarization of politics here could be complete. Until now, an important bridge across the race divide in Mississippi has occurred, for instance, in the Legislature, where for three decades blacks and centrist white Democrats have formed coalitions to finance public education, or to push back against conservative Republican governors who sought cuts in social programs.

“The beauty of what I’ve witnessed over the last 28 years is we’ve worked together,” said Thomas U. Reynolds, who is white and the state representative from the quiet courthouse town of Charleston in the north Mississippi hills.

Mr. Brown, by contrast, said Mr. Reynolds’s district — and others like it — would be more properly represented by a black, another motive cited for pursuing closed primaries.

A stooped country lawyer with a populist bent, Mr. Reynolds has traversed much of Mississippi’s four-decade emergence from segregation in the state Legislature, preoccupied with what he sees as Democratic causes like better education and health care. To get past the ruling, Mr. Reynolds said he was counting on the voters he greets by first name in the courthouse square to support him, regardless of party or race.

“These folks, black and white, are my friends,” he said.

Such support, however, cannot be taken for granted in a state where 85 percent of whites voted for Mr. Bush in 2004.

Calling Judge Pepper’s ruling a “tragedy,” Mr. Reynolds said voters should be allowed to vote for the candidate of their choice, regardless of party. “Of all the things that could have happened, this doesn’t help us,” he said. “It would further racially polarize Mississippi, and that’s one thing we don’t want.”

Judge Pepper ordered the Legislature to put a new system in place by Aug. 31, 2008. He also said photo identification for voters should be instituted, a requirement that is meeting resistance from some who welcome his other findings. Among those opponents is Mr. Turnage, the plaintiffs’ lawyer.

Others — old-line white Democrats — are hoping against hope that the ruling will simply prove a fleeting nightmare if it is muddied by the Legislature or overturned on appeal — though none have been announced.

“If this thing comes to pass, it’s the end of the Democratic Party in the state of Mississippi,” said Hob Bryan, a longtime centrist state senator from the northeastern part of the state.

“I don’t want to exclude anyone from the Democratic Party,” Mr. Bryan said. “I want to include more people.”

    In Mississippi, Ruling Is Seen as Racial Split, NYT, 18.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/us/18south.html?hp

Asylum Ruling Leaves Out Chinese Spouses

July 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:39 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- The husbands of women forced to abort a pregnancy, undergo involuntary sterilization or face persecution under China's coercive population control program do not automatically qualify for asylum, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan conflicts with rulings by several other federal appeals courts.

Judge Guido Calabresi called it remarkable that ''essentially everyone on this court agrees'' that U.S. law does not automatically grant asylum to spouses. He noted the ruling directly conflicts with a dozen other federal appeals courts as well as the findings of the Board of Immigration Appeals and 10 years of rulings in immigration cases.

China's family planning policy -- implemented in the late 1970s -- limits most urban couples to one child and families in some rural areas to two to control population growth and conserve natural resources.

Human rights activists complain the policy has led to forced abortions, sterilizations and a dangerously imbalanced sex ratio due to a traditional preference for male heirs, which has prompted countless families to abort female fetuses in hopes of getting boys.

    Asylum Ruling Leaves Out Chinese Spouses, NYT, 16.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Chinese-Immigrants-Spouses.html

Black Convicted of Swindling Millions

July 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CHICAGO (AP) -- Former media mogul Conrad Black was convicted Friday of swindling the far-flung Hollinger International newspaper empire he once ran out of millions of dollars, becoming the latest in a wave of disgraced corporate executives to face prison time for financial fraud.

Black, 62, who once renounced his Canadian citizenship to become a member of the British House of Lords, was found guilty by a federal jury of three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice for spiriting documents out of his Toronto office in defiance of a court order.

Black was acquitted of nine other counts ranging from tax fraud to the most serious charge -- racketeering. He was also acquitted of fleecing Hollinger shareholders through such perks as taking the corporate jet on a two-week vacation to the island of Bora Bora.

The three-month trial drew international media attention, heightened by the silver-haired British lord's posh lifestyle and sometimes haughty comments. When shareholders grumbled about the cost of the Bora Bora trip, he wrote a memo saying: ''I'm not prepared to re-enact the French revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility.''

Three other former Hollinger executives, John Boultbee, 65, of Victoria, British Columbia, Peter Y. Atkinson, 60, of Oakville, Ontario, and Mark Kipnis, 59, of Northbrook, Ill., were also convicted of fraud charges.

Prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve to have Black jailed immediately, saying he could face approximately 15 years to nearly 20 years in federal prison for the conviction. But defense attorneys said the actual sentence was likely to be much less.

In contrast to the $84 million in fraud prosecutors blamed on Black when he was indicted two years ago, the jurors found him guilty of a fraction of that -- defense attorneys put the amount at $3.5 million.

Still, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said the government was ''gratified'' by the verdict.

''We think the verdict vindicates the serious public interest in making sure that when insiders in a corporation deal with money entrusted to them by the shareholders, that they not engage in self-dealing, that they not break the law to benefit themselves instead of the shareholders,'' Fitzgerald said.

St. Eve set a Nov. 30 sentencing date, confiscated Black's passport and ordered him to remain in the Chicago area while she considers the government's request that she revoke his $21 million bond, partly secured by a seaside estate in Palm Beach, Fla. A hearing on the bond issue is scheduled for Thursday.

Black defense attorney Edward M. Genson argued that Black had ''wanted his day in court and now wants his day on appeal'' and would not run away.

''He has had his day in court,'' countered prosecutor Eric H. Sussman, ''and now the question is whether he will have his day of sentencing.''

Black was stony faced as he handed over the passport. When St. Eve asked if he would appear for sentencing, he said: ''Absolutely.''

Black avoided reporters' questions as he left the courthouse Friday afternoon. Edward Greenspan, Black's Canadian defense attorney, promised an appeal on ''viable legal issues.''

''We came here to face 13 counts and an indictment. Conrad Black was acquitted of all the central charges. They have been dismissed,'' Greenspan said, reading from a statement and refusing to answer questions.

''We vehemently disagree with the government's position on sentencing,'' he said, but did not offer what he believes is a proper sentencing range.

Hollinger International, based in Chicago, was at one time one of the world's largest publisher of community newspapers as well as the Chicago Sun-Times, the Daily Telegraph of London and Israel's Jerusalem Post.

At the core of the charges against Black was a strategy he arrived at starting in 1998 to sell off the bulk of the small community papers, which were published in smaller cities across the United States and Canada.

Black and other Hollinger executives received millions of dollars in payments from the companies that bought the community papers in return for promises that they would not return to compete with the new owners.

Prosecutors said the executives pocketed the money, which they said belonged to shareholders, without telling Hollinger's board of directors.

In the end, jurors convicted Black in connection with two sets of noncompete payments.

One involved $2.6 million in such payments he received in exchange for a noncompete pledge made to the American Publishing Co. The company was a Hollinger subsidiary and thus Black and executives who also got such payments were effectively getting money not to compete with themselves.

The other were ''supplemental payments'' made in April 2001 after Hollinger executives realized there had been no non-competition money in sales of community newspapers to Horizon Publications Inc. in March 1999 and to Forum Communications Inc. in September 2000.

Realizing that no such non-competition money for them had been included in the deals, the executives ordered up ''supplemental payments.'' Black's share of that money came to $285,000.

The American Publishing money and supplemental payments were covered in three counts of the indictment. The fourth count Black was convicted of involved the removal of documents from his Toronto offices after a court had ordered them frozen unless otherwise permitted by a court monitor.

The government's star witness at the trial was F. David Radler, Black's partner in building the Hollinger empire over three decades. He pleaded guilty to mail fraud and agreed to testify in exchange for a lenient 29-month sentence and a $250,000 fine.

Black had said that he was busy with newspaper interests in Britain and eastern Canada and left most of the sales of community newspapers and noncompete arrangements to Radler. But Radler said that Black was well aware of how and why the money was being paid.

Associated Press Writers Don Babwin, Carla K. Johnson, Dave Carpenter and Dan Strumpf in Chicago contributed to this report.

    Black Convicted of Swindling Millions, NYT, 14.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Black-Trial.html

Grand Jury Indicts Former Newark Mayor

July 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:06 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- The probe into former Newark Mayor Sharpe James began with a tip from a concerned citizen to the FBI three years ago, while James was still running New Jersey's largest city.

Code named ''Cornered Lot,'' the investigation, conducted by the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the state Attorney General's Office, yielded reams of letters and credit card receipts, contracts and land sale records.

On Thursday, it produced an indictment charging James with using city credit cards for more than $58,000 in personal expenses during trips to locations including Martha's Vineyard, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Rio de Janeiro. He's also charged with conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and with engineering the cut-rate sale of city properties.

''Sharpe James' long history in this city is forever scarred by the allegations contained within this indictment today,'' said U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie. ''Sen. James used both his office as mayor and his office as state senator as a personal piggy bank.''

James, 71, who first entered public life with a seat on Newark's city council in 1970, was elected the city's second black mayor in 1986. His 20-year tenure saw major redevelopment in downtown Newark, with projects including the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and a city-subsidized hockey arena to open this fall.

He failed, however, to make significant progress in combatting crime, poverty and decay in the outlying neighborhoods of the city. Newark is still trying to move beyond its deadly 1967 riots, which began 40 years ago Thursday.

James has also been a state senator since 1999. He declined to run for re-election as mayor last year, and announced earlier this year that he would not seek re-election to his Senate seat.

On Thursday afternoon, he appeared in court wearing handcuffs and answering ''Yes, I do,'' when asked whether he understood the charges against him. The judge set bail at $250,000. James must also surrender his passport and stay within the state.

Hours later, he walked out of the courthouse with his attorneys, asserting his innocence and promising vindication.

''I am innocent of all these charges, and I look forward to my day in court where the truth will be told,'' he said.

Ethical questions have long dogged James, who has a home on the Jersey shore, a yacht and a Rolls-Royce. Tom Wilson, the state Republican Party chairman, blamed Democratic leaders for tolerating James' ethics lapses and called on James to resign from the Senate.

Democratic Gov. Jon S. Corzine and Senate President Richard J. Codey said the accusations were best addressed in court.

The credit card charges occurred between 2001 and 2006. The expenses include luxury hotel suites, expensive meals, air fare, car rentals and a trip to Florida to test drive a Rolls-Royce the James was considering purchasing, according to the indictment. In one case, James allegedly used a city credit card to pay for a penthouse suite on a cruise scheduled for six weeks after he left office.

Tamika Riley, one of eight women who accompanied James on various trips, also was charged with fraud.

The indictment charges that James improperly steered properties to Riley and helped her resell at least seven properties at much higher prices. Riley, a publicist and former Newark clothing store operator, was able to buy the properties even though she lacked real estate and construction experience and the financial wherewithal to rehabilitate them, the indictment alleges.

In an Aug. 3, 2001, deal, Riley bought a city-owned lot for $6,000, then sold it less than three months later for $155,000, according to the indictment.

Riley, 38, of Jersey City, was arrested by the FBI and appeared in court Thursday; her bail was set at $100,000. Calls to her lawyer were not returned.

Under federal sentencing guidelines, James could face seven to eight years in prison if convicted on all counts. However, the judge has the authority to impose a much stiffer penalty -- as much as 20 years on some individual counts.

The former mayor has said little publicly since federal investigators notified him last month that he was the target of a corruption probe.

In a handwritten letter to The Associated Press dated June 16, James said he never had the power to broker land deals or set prices by himself.

He earns $49,000 a year as a state senator and collects an annual pension of about $125,000 from Newark.

Additionally, he accrued more than $1 million in a retirement account at Essex County College, where he worked two decades ago. Last week he withdrew $500,000 from the retirement account, state Treasury Department spokesman Tom Vincz said.


Associated Press writers David Porter in Newark and Tom Hester Jr. in Trenton contributed to this report.

    Grand Jury Indicts Former Newark Mayor, NYT, 13.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Ex-Mayor-Indicted.html

Editorial

Overprivileged Executive

July 11, 2007
The New York Times

t is hardly news that top officials in the current Justice Department flout the law and make false statements to Congress, but the latest instance may be the most egregious. When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wanted the USA Patriot Act renewed in the spring of 2005, he told the Senate, “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.” But The Washington Post reported yesterday that just six days earlier, the F.B.I. had sent Mr. Gonzales a report saying that it had obtained personal information it should not have.

This is hardly the first time Mr. Gonzales has played so free and loose with the facts in his public statements and Congressional testimony. In the United States attorneys scandal — the controversy over the political purge of nine top prosecutors — Mr. Gonzales and his aides have twisted and mutilated the truth beyond recognition.

Congress and the American public need to know all that has gone on at the Justice Department. But instead of aiding that search for the truth, President Bush is blocking it, invoking executive privilege this week to prevent Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and Sara Taylor, a former top aide to Karl Rove, from telling Congress what they know about the purge of federal prosecutors.

Mr. Bush’s claim is baseless. Executive privilege, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is a judge-made right of limited scope, intended to create a sphere of privacy around the president so that he can have honest discussions with his advisers. The White House has insisted throughout the scandal that Mr. Bush — and even Mr. Gonzales — was not in the loop about the firings. If that is the case, the privilege should not apply.

Even if Mr. Bush was directly involved, Ms. Miers and Ms. Taylor would have no right to withhold their testimony. The Supreme Court made clear in the Watergate tapes case, its major pronouncement on the subject, that the privilege does not apply if a president’s privacy interests are outweighed by the need to investigate possible criminal activity. Congress has already identified many acts relating to the scandal that may have been illegal, including possible obstruction of justice and lying to Congress.

The White House argues that its insistence on the privilege is larger than this one case, that it is protecting the presidency from inappropriate demands from Congress. But the reverse is true. This White House has repeatedly made clear that it does not respect Congress’s constitutional role. If Congress backs down, it would not only be compromising an important investigation of Justice Department malfeasance. It would be doing serious damage to the balance of powers.

Ms. Taylor is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and Ms. Miers before the House committee tomorrow. They are expected to claim executive privilege. If they do, Congress should use the powers at its disposal, including holding them in contempt, to compel their testimony.

    Overprivileged Executive, NYT, 11.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/opinion/11wed1.html

Court Rejects ACLU Domestic Spying Suit

July 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:15 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CINCINNATI (AP) -- A divided federal appeals court rejected a lawsuit Friday challenging President Bush's domestic spying program without ruling on the issue of whether warrantless wiretapping is legal.

In a 2-1 decision with Republican-appointed judges in the majority, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the plaintiffs had no standing to sue because they couldn't prove their communications had been monitored by the government.

The decision underscored the difficulty of challenging the anti-terrorism program in court because its secret nature prevents plaintiffs from obtaining surveillance information. The National Security Agency had refused to turn over information about the warrantless wiretapping that would have bolstered the court case.

''This is a Catch-22,'' said Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit. ''I think what in effect they're saying is that we can't tell you whether you have been wiretapped because that's a secret. And unless you know you've been wiretapped, you can't challenge that program.''

The appeals court vacated a 2006 order by a lower court in Detroit, which had concluded that the warrantless surveillance authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was unconstitutional.

President Bush authorized warrantless monitoring of international telephone calls and e-mails to or from the United States when one party is believed to be a terrorist or to have terrorist ties. The government has kept details confidential, saying the case involved state secrets whose disclosure would threaten national security.

While sidestepping the question of constitutionality, Judge Alice M. Batchelder and Judge Julia Smith Gibbons wrote that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue without proof they were monitored by the government.

''The plaintiffs are ultimately prevented from establishing standing because of the state secrets privilege,'' Gibbons wrote.

Judge Ronald Lee Gilman, a Democratic appointee, disagreed, saying the plaintiffs were within their rights to sue and that it was clear the surveillance program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The government had said it sometimes needed to act without waiting for the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established by the 1978 law.

Earlier this year, the Bush administration said the eavesdropping program is now overseen by a special federal intelligence court, so the case was moot. But, by sidestepping the constitutionality of the surveillance program, the appeals court left open the possibility that Bush or another president could restart the program, and opponents contend that means the case remains relevant.

The appellate decision didn't address the legality of the wiretapping program or absolve the administration of complying with a congressional subpoena seeking more information, said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who is head of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

''There is a dark cloud over the White House's warrantless wiretapping program, and a full response to the outstanding subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee by this Administration would be a good start to clearing the air,'' Leahy said in a statement.

The Justice Department and the White House were pleased with the outcome.

''We have always believed that the District Court's decision declaring the terrorist surveillance program unconstitutional was wrongly decided,'' White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Department of Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the surveillance program was ''a vital intelligence program that helped detect and prevent terrorist attacks. It was always subject to rigorous oversight and review.''

The ACLU pursued the lawsuit on behalf of other groups, including lawyers, journalists and scholars who asserted that the government monitoring prevented them from doing their jobs properly. The suit was filed in January 2006, a month after the program's existence became known publicly.

Others have filed court challenges to the program, but none has gotten as far in the court system.

Shapiro said the ACLU is considering all its legal options, including asking for a full-court hearing in the 6th Circuit or asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider it. If the ACLU doesn't pursue an appeal, the case would go back to the U.S. District Court in Michigan for dismissal.

A law professor who has closely followed the case thinks it will be dropped.

''The case is not moot because the government could continue the program at any time,'' said Robert A. Sedler, a law professor at Wayne State University. ''But because it's not now in effect, the Supreme Court is not likely to hear it. It's simply not an important case anymore.''

------

On the Net:

U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals: http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov 

    Court Rejects ACLU Domestic Spying Suit, NYT, 7.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Domestic-Spying.html

Alleged DC Madam Can Distribute Records

July 6, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:30 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A woman accused of running a prostitution ring in the nation's capital is free to distribute thousands of pages of phone records after a federal judge lifted a restraining order on Thursday.

U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler's order granted the request of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 51, of Vallejo, Calif., to quash restrictions by government prosecutors that prohibited her from giving away the list.

''As a result, Jeane has determined to release those records under certain conditions to qualified individuals or organizations,'' wrote her attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, in an e-mail.

Palfrey and her attorney have said the list contains up to 15,000 names and could shake up Washington by revealing high-profile individuals.

Prosecutors had won two temporary restraining orders to prevent her from distributing the list, first to preserve its availability, and then to prevent the harassment of potential witnesses through its distribution.

But prosecutors' arguments did not hold up, the judge ruled. The availability of the list is not in jeopardy and it was not seized or listed with her other assets that were subject to forfeiture, Kessler wrote.

Freezing ''the personal property of an individual, not yet convicted of any crime'' would be an extraordinary step, the requirements of which government prosecutors failed to satisfy, the judge wrote.

Palfrey is facing federal racketeering and conspiracy charges for running what she says was a legal escort service. Prosecutors say the business netted more than $2 million from 1993 to 2006.

    Alleged DC Madam Can Distribute Records, NYT, 6.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Escort-List.html

Bush Rationale on Libby Stirs Legal Debate

July 4, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

In commuting I. Lewis Libby Jr.’s 30-month prison sentence on Monday, President Bush drew on the same array of arguments about the federal sentencing system often made by defense lawyers — and routinely and strenuously opposed by his own Justice Department.

Critics of the system have a long list of complaints. Sentences, they say, are too harsh. Judges are allowed to take account of facts not proven to the jury. The defendant’s positive contributions are ignored, as is the collateral damage that imprisonment causes the families involved.

On Monday, Mr. Bush made use of every element of that critique in a detailed statement setting out his reasons for commuting Mr. Libby’s sentence — handing an unexpected gift to defense lawyers around the country, who scrambled to make use of the president’s arguments in their own cases.

Given the administration’s tough stand on sentencing, the president’s arguments left experts in sentencing law scratching their heads.

“The Bush administration, in some sense following the leads of three previous administrations, has repeatedly supported a federal sentencing system that is distinctly disrespectful of the very arguments that Bush has put forward in cutting Libby a break,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University who writes the blog Sentencing Law and Policy.

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Bush’s decision to grant a commutation rather than an outright pardon has started a national conversation about sentencing generally.

“By saying that the sentence was excessive, I wonder if he understood the ramifications of saying that,” said Ellen S. Podgor, who teaches criminal law at Stetson University in St. Petersburg, Fla. “This is opening up a can of worms about federal sentencing.”

The Libby clemency will be the basis for many legal arguments, said Susan James, an Alabama lawyer representing Don E. Siegelman, the state’s former governor, who is appealing a sentence he received last week of 88 months for obstruction of justice and other offenses.

“It’s far more important than if he’d just pardoned Libby,” Ms. James said, as forgiving a given offense as an act of executive grace would have had only political repercussions. “What you’re going to see is people like me quoting President Bush in every pleading that comes across every federal judge’s desk.”

Indeed, Mr. Bush’s decision may have given birth to a new sort of legal document.

“I anticipate that we’re going to get a new motion called ‘the Libby motion,’ ” Professor Podgor said. “It will basically say, ‘My client should have got what Libby got, and here’s why.’ ”

As a purely legal matter, of course, Mr. Bush’s statement has no particular force outside Mr. Libby’s case. But that does not mean judges will necessarily ignore it.

No one disputes that Mr. Bush has the authority under the Constitution to issue pardons and commutations for federal crimes. But experts in the area, pointing to political scandals in the Reagan, Truman and Grant administrations, said Mr. Bush had acted with unusual speed.

“What distinguishes Scooter Libby from the acts of clemency in the other three episodes,” said P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor who studies pardons at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., referring to Mr. Libby by his nickname, “is that in those episodes they generally served their time and some other president pardoned them.”

Mr. Bush repeated yesterday that he had found Mr. Libby’s punishment to be too severe. But experts in federal sentencing law said a sentence of 30 months for lying and obstruction was consistent with the tough sentences routinely meted out by the federal system.

“On what legal basis could he have reached that result?” asked Frank O. Bowman III, an authority on federal sentencing who teaches law at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said of the commutation. “There is no legal basis.”

Nor is there a reason to think that the Justice Department has changed its position about the sentencing system generally. Indeed, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said last month that the department would push for legislation making federal sentences tougher and less flexible.

Similarly, in a case decided two weeks ago by the United States Supreme Court and widely discussed by legal specialists in light of the Libby case, the Justice Department persuaded the court to affirm the 33-month sentence of a defendant whose case closely resembled that against Mr. Libby. The defendant, Victor A. Rita, was, like Mr. Libby, convicted of perjury, making false statements to federal agents and obstruction of justice.Mr. Rita has performed extensive government service, just as Mr. Libby has. Mr. Rita served in the armed forces for more than 25 years, receiving 35 commendations, awards and medals. Like Mr. Libby, Mr. Rita had no criminal history for purposes of the federal sentencing guidelines.

The judges who sentenced the two men increased their sentences by taking account of the crimes about which they lied. Mr. Rita’s perjury concerned what the court called “a possible violation of a machine-gun registration law”; Mr. Libby’s of a possible violation of a federal law making it a crime to disclose the identities of undercover intelligence agents in some circumstances.

When Mr. Rita argued that his 33-month sentence had failed to consider his history and circumstances adequately, the Justice Department strenuously disagreed.

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, posted a copy of the government’s brief in the Rita case on his blog yesterday and asked, “Why is the president flip-flopping on these criminal justice decisions?”

The Justice Department also took a hard line last year in the case of Jamie Olis, a midlevel executive at the energy company Dynegy convicted of accounting fraud. The department argued that Mr. Olis deserved 292 months, or more than 24 years. He was sentenced to six years.

Sentencing experts said Mr. Libby’s sentence was both tough and in line with general trends.

“It was a pretty harsh sentence,” Professor Berman said, “because I tend to view any term of imprisonment for nonviolent first offenses as harsh. But it certainly wasn’t out of the normal array of cases I see every day.”

    Bush Rationale on Libby Stirs Legal Debate, NYT, 4.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/04/washington/04commute.html?hp

Atheists Sue N.D. Over Youth Ranch

June 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) -- An atheist group says North Dakota officials are using public money to religiously indoctrinate young people at the Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch, according to a federal lawsuit.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation wants a judge to declare a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state, and order the government to stop sending children or money to the ranch.

The ranch has three residential facilities for troubled youth and also offers day-programs.

About $7 million in federal, state and county money has gone through the Human Services Department to foster care services at Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch in two years, but the money is not for religious programs, said Carol Olson, executive director of the state Human Services Department.

''The Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch receives private donations to support their spiritual life programs,'' Olson said.

The government money makes up about 70 percent of the organization's budget, said Gene Kaseman, president of the Dakota Boys and Girls Ranch Association.

The ranch is affiliated with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Its mission is to ''help at risk children and their families succeed in the name of Christ,'' according to its Web site.

''The Dakota Boys & Girls Ranch provides services to children in the context of an explicitly Christian community, including post-release mentoring services, which are publicly funded with taxpayer appropriations,'' the lawsuit says.

It would be difficult for the Boys and Girls Ranch to keep public and private money separate, said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Even if that is possible, she said, public money frees up more private money for religious purposes.

''The whole purpose of this ranch is to proselytize and indoctrinate,'' she said.

The suit filed Tuesday in federal court in Bismarck against Lisa Bjergaard, director of juvenile services for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and Daniel Richter, director of Ward County Social Services.

Bjergaard said no youth are placed in a facility ''without a good, thorough review that ensures that they're placed in compliance with state and federal law.''

    Atheists Sue N.D. Over Youth Ranch, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Boys-Ranch-Lawsuit.html

Ex-Klansman found guilty in Mississippi killings

Thu Jun 14, 2007
11:40PM EDT
Reuters
By Matt Saldana

JACKSON, Mississippi (Reuters) - A former Ku Klux Klansman was found guilty of kidnapping on Thursday in the 1964 killings of two black men in Mississippi, a case that highlighted white supremacist violence during the civil rights era.

A federal jury deliberated just two hours before convicting James Seale, who was also charged with conspiracy in the killings of 19-year-old Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore who were kidnapped while hitchhiking.

According to the indictment and testimony, they were taken to a national forest and Seale trained a shotgun on the teenagers while his companions beat them.

They then stuffed Dee and Moore into the trunk of a car, drove them to an offshoot of the Mississippi River, attached heavy weights to them and threw them alive into the water from a boat, prosecutors said.

The jury made clear neither of the kidnapped men was "returned unharmed," a statement that may increase a sentence whose maximum amounts to a life term on each count.

As the verdict was delivered, Seale, 71, turned to his wife, Jean, and whispered, "Are you OK?" Relatives of Dee and Moore, who had waited decades for justice, hugged each other and cried.

"I'm rejoicing for justice in this country. I see them (Dee and Moore) as rejoicing in heaven right now. Mississippi spoke today," said Thomas Moore, Charles' elder brother who worked for years to bring the case to court.

"Today's conviction of James Ford Seale brings some long overdue justice to the families of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, who were brutally murdered more than 40 years ago," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in a statement.

The main prosecution witness, another former Klansman who was granted immunity, testified during the trial that Seale told him he had killed Dee and Moore.

The trial was the latest brought by federal prosecutors in an attempt to clear up crimes during the 1950s and 1960s by white supremacists who aimed to terrify the black community into not supporting a campaign for civil and voting rights for African-Americans in the racially segregated South.

In many cases, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups were able to operate with impunity because they were supported by local law enforcement and judicial authorities.

By the same token, black Americans had few legal protections, and crimes against them often attracted little publicity.

The bodies of Dee and Moore were only recovered during a high-profile search for three civil rights activists later that year whose deaths generated widespread revulsion at the racial violence in Mississippi.

In 2005, a Mississippi jury convicted Klansman Edgar Ray Killen of three counts of manslaughter in those murders, which formed the basis of the 1988 film "Mississippi Burning."

    Ex-Klansman found guilty in Mississippi killings, R, 14.6.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1430400820070615

Libby Judge Received Threats

June 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:41 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal judge who oversaw I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby's CIA leak trial said Thursday that he received threatening letters and phone calls after sentencing the former White House aide to prison.

''I received a number of angry, harassing mean-spirited phone calls and letters,'' U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said. ''Some of those were wishing bad things on me and my family.''

Walton made the remarks as he opened a hearing into whether to delay Libby's 2 1/2-year sentence. He said he was holding the letters in case something happened but said they would have no effect on Thursday's decision.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, argues that he shouldn't have to report to prison until his appeals have run out.

Walton has said he's not inclined to grant that request. But even if he rules that way, it is unlikely Libby would be taken away in handcuffs. Rather, it would lead to more maneuvering in Libby's legal fight.

Libby's newly formed appellate team -- Lawrence S. Robbins and Mark Stancil -- are standing by. If Libby loses Thursday, his lawyers have said they will ask an appeals court for an emergency order delaying the sentence. Because one of the issues in the appeal is whether Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had the authority to charge Libby, defense lawyers also could ask the Supreme Court to step in.

Then there is the pardon question.

Libby's supporters have called for President Bush wipe away Libby's convictions. Bush publicly has sidestepped pardon questions, saying he wants to let the legal case play out.

If Bush were to decide to issue a pardon, a delay would give him more flexibility to pick a time that makes the most political sense.

Bush's father pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others in the Iran-Contra arms and money affair on Christmas Eve 1992.

President Clinton pardoned more than 100 people on his way out the White House door, including former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros and Whitewater scandal figure Susan McDougal.

After a monthlong trial, jurors found in March that Libby lied to investigators about how he learned that Valerie Plame, the wife of an outspoken war critic, worked for the CIA, and whom he told.

Libby maintains his innocence and says any misstatements were the result of a bad memory, not deception.

To win a delay of his sentence, Libby's lawyers would have to show there was a good chance they could overturn the conviction on appeal.

Attorneys argue that, during trial, they were unfairly prohibited from discussing the classified issues that were weighing on Libby's mind at the time of the leak and from questioning witnesses that could have helped his case.

    Libby Judge Received Threats, NYT, 14.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-CIA-Leak-Trial.html

Bail Denied for Alleged 'Spam King'

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:15 p.m. ET
The New York Times

SEATTLE (AP) -- A man accused of defrauding people through tens of millions of spam e-mail messages sent around the world was denied bail Wednesday.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James P. Donohue said Robert Soloway, 27, of Seattle, should remain in jail until his trial scheduled for Aug. 6 because he has minimal ties to Washington state and has family in Sweden.

''These are allegations of cyber crimes that have no geographical borders,'' Donohue said. ''It's just as easy to continue these actions in Sweden as it is in the United States.''

But Soloway's attorney, Richard Troberman, wrote in a court filing that the government's evidence that Soloway would flee was ''woefully short on facts.'' Soloway has only traveled out of the country with his parents, Troberman said.

Soloway -- dubbed the ''Spam King'' by federal investigators -- was arrested May 30 on 35 charges including mail fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

The government is also seeking $773,000 as proceeds of Soloway's activities.

Federal prosecutors allege that Soloway has sent tens of millions of e-mail messages since 2003 to advertise his company, which offered software to send out broadcast e-mails. For $495, customers could have an ad sent to 20 million e-mail addresses or receive software allowing them to send up to 80 million e-mails.

The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization, listed Soloway as one of about 135 spammers deemed responsible for as much as 80 percent of all junk e-mail.

Soloway and his company's Web site claimed that the e-mail addresses on his lists were given by people who agreed to receive messages, and that the product offered a money-back guarantee.

However, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma said in court that Soloway told customers who tried to receive refunds that he would take them to a collection agency and ruin their credit.

People were also unable to opt-out of Soloway's spam list, costing them time and money, Warma said. The Santa Barbara County, Calif., Department of Social Services said it spent $1,000 a week to fight the spam it received, according to Warma and court documents.

Donohue also said Soloway's previous actions demonstrated an unwillingness to abide by court orders. Soloway continued his spamming even after Microsoft Corp. won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.

    Bail Denied for Alleged 'Spam King', NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Spam-King.html

Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission

June 14, 2007
The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, June 13 — In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.

Paralleling concerns of many conservative groups, the Justice Department has successfully argued in a number of cases that government agencies, employers or private organizations have improperly suppressed religious expression in situations that the Constitution’s drafters did not mean to restrict.

The shift at the Justice Department has significantly altered the government’s civil rights mission, said Brian K. Landsberg, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and a former Justice Department lawyer under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Not until recently has anyone in the department considered religious discrimination such a high priority,” Professor Landsberg said. “No one had ever considered it to be of the same magnitude as race or national origin.”

Cynthia Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement that the agency had “worked diligently to enforce the federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on religion.”

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

¶Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.

¶Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration.

Along with its changed civil rights mission, the department has also tried to overhaul the roster of government lawyers who deal with civil rights. The agency has transferred or demoted some experienced civil rights litigators while bringing in lawyers, including graduates of religious-affiliated law schools and some people vocal about their faith, who favor the new priorities. That has created some unease, with some career lawyers disdainfully referring to the newcomers as “holy hires.”

The department’s emphasis has been embraced by some groups representing Muslims, Jews and especially Christian conservatives, who have long complained that the federal government ignored their grievances about discrimination.

“We live in a society that is becoming more religiously diverse, even by the hour,” said Kevin Seamus Hasson, who founded the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty 12 years ago. “So it’s entirely appropriate and slightly overdue that the Justice Department is paying more attention to the various frictions that increasing religious diversity is causing in the society.”

Combating racism remains an important mission, Mr. Hasson said, but one that has changed over the years. “We can now deal with the problems of racism more effectively on a more local level,” he argued. “We don’t always need the federal government to come riding over the hill.”

Some religious figures, though, are more wary about the changes at the Justice Department. Robert Edgar, president of the National Council of Churches, a liberal-leaning group, agreed that it was important to take on issues like religious discrimination and human trafficking.

But the problems of race and poverty in America “still require the highest caliber of attention,” said Mr. Edgar, who cited the flawed government response to New Orleans and its mostly poor, black population after Hurricane Katrina. He said he was distrustful of the Justice Department’s leadership to make appropriate decisions as to the nation’s civil rights priorities.

A New Mission

Some critics say that many of the Justice Department’s religious-oriented initiatives are outside its mandate from Congress. While statutes prohibit religious discrimination in areas like employment and housing, no laws address some of the issues in which the department has become involved.

“They are engaging in freewheeling social engineering,” said Ayesha Khan, counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and “using the power of the federal government to put in place an ideological, not constitutional agenda.”

The department declined to make available for interviews Assistant Attorney General Wan J. Kim, who heads the civil rights division, or Eric Treene, who holds the newly created position of special counsel for religious discrimination.

Ms. Magnuson, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said it was justified in devoting so much attention to the issue because Congress has demonstrated its interest by including religion in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and enacting the 2000 law involving zoning restrictions, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

Ms. Magnuson also said the department had not diminished its interest in enforcing racial and national origin discrimination cases. The changes at the Justice Department began under Attorney General John Ashcroft, but have accelerated under Alberto R. Gonzales, his successor.

Mr. Gonzales has increasingly cited his agency’s record on behalf of religious causes as among his most important accomplishments, often noting the successful intervention in cases on behalf of people who had suffered discrimination for wearing Muslim head coverings. In speeches, he routinely says that religious freedom is the nation’s “first freedom because our founders saw fit to place it first in the Bill of Rights.”

President Bush has also talked of the department’s religion-related activities in appearances before religious conservatives, an important element of his support. Aside from any political benefit of satisfying conservative groups, the Justice Department’s shift has brought a more subtle dividend: a defense to the criticism leveled at past Republican administrations that they were half-hearted about civil rights enforcement.

Changing Mission

The Bush administration has avoided that problem by changing the civil rights mission to something its Justice Department can take on with enthusiasm.

The department has prevailed in many, if not most of the cases in which it has become involved. It has, in effect, duplicated in the religious arena its past success in cases involving race and national origin.

At the same time, the department has sharply reduced its efforts to combat voting rights plans that may dilute black electoral strength.

Ms. Magnuson, the department spokeswoman, said that the civil rights division had brought more voting rights lawsuits under Mr. Bush than had been brought in the Clinton administration.

But an examination of the Justice Department’s Web site listing of the cases brought through early 2007 shows that many of them involved a different part of the law, one that requires voting materials be available in languages other than English in places with high concentrations of Asian and Hispanic voters.

Joseph D. Rich, who recently stepped down as head of the voting rights section after a 37-year career at Justice, said that only the federal government had the resources to bring voting dilution cases, while private groups have been able to bring the language cases. The civil rights division also brought the first case ever on behalf of white voters, alleging in 2005 that a black political leader in Noxubee County, Miss., was intimidating whites at the polls.

The shift in priorities at the criminal section of the civil rights division has been especially stark. The criminal section — which previously had mostly focused on hate crimes or lawsuits against police officers who may have violated someone’s civil rights — began taking on human trafficking cases that had previously been handled elsewhere.

During Mr. Bush’s second term, the section brought dozens of cases against people charged under a new law with bringing women into the country to work in brothels. The new employees with religious backgrounds were enthusiastic about such cases, seeing them akin to combating slavery, a former career lawyer in the division said.

Pursuing trafficking cases, rather than those involving hate crimes or police abuse, was seen as important to moving ahead in the department, current and former career officials said. They added that political appointees in supervisory positions frequently vetoed proposed hate crime investigations or questioned them to death.

“You only needed for that to happen a few times and people got the message they shouldn’t be eager to send up such cases,” said one lawyer who would talk only on condition of anonymity.

Rigel C. Oliveri, a law professor at the University of Missouri who worked in the civil rights division during the Clinton and early Bush years, said it became increasingly frustrating to bring what she said were worthy civil rights cases, because the political appointees would not act on them. “It was like a black hole,” she said.

Whatever cases may have been slowed or ignored, some religious leaders said they were grateful for actions the department had taken.

The Rev. N. J. L’Heureux, the executive director of the Queens Federation of Churches in New York, said the department had helped several Christian, Muslim and Jewish congregations deal with local governments trying to block houses of worship in neighborhoods. In Hollywood, Fla., for example, the department successfully sued the city for denying a permit to an Orthodox synagogue.

Sometimes, Mr. L’Heureux said, an inquiry from Mr. Treene, the special religious affairs counsel, had been enough to encourage local governments to drop their resistance. The civil rights division favorably resolved 16 of 26 zoning investigations simply by expressing interest in them, according to the Justice Department.

Kareem W. Shora, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said that Mr. Treene had also intervened in cases the group brought to him about Arab prison inmates having access to prayer opportunities.

In so-called equal-access cases, the department has mostly won court rulings allowing religious organizations like the Child Evangelism Fellowship to have the same access to public school students as nonreligious groups, a principle generally approved by a divided Supreme Court in 2001.

In the candy cane case, for example, school officials in Westfield, Mass., had suspended students for handing out candy canes with religious messages, saying it was disruptive and lurid. The students said that the “J” shape represented Jesus and the red stripes his blood, the white his purity. In a pending case from San Diego, the government defended the city’s campground lease to the Boy Scouts, which had been challenged because of the group’s religious tenets. The department has also challenged so-called Blaine amendments, which are state constitutional provisions enforcing separation of church and state more rigidly than does the United States Constitution. The federal government sued because the amendments could impede Mr. Bush’s religion-based initiative, which provides money to religious groups for social programs.

Reshaping the Staff

As it has reoriented its priorities, the department has also tried to remake the cast of government lawyers who enforce civil rights. A number of career lawyers who served as section heads or deputies in the civil rights division have been replaced.

In Congressional testimony in March, Mr. Rich said seven managers had been removed or marginalized for what he characterized as political reasons or perceived disloyalty. Department officials acknowledge the changes, but dispute the reasons.

In addition, Mr. Ashcroft arranged for the agency’s senior political appointees to take over the decades-old system used to hire recent law school graduates for entry-level career jobs that are supposed to be nonpartisan.

Under the system, known as the honors program, nonpolitical career lawyers had screened applicants. Those selected were almost exclusively graduates of top-ranked law schools and often had had prestigious judicial clerkships or other relevant experience.

Monica M. Goodling, a former senior aide to Mr. Gonzales, testified to a House committee last month that she had improperly used politics to hire some people as assistant federal prosecutors and for other civil service jobs, a possible violation of federal employment laws.

But the pattern of hiring on an ideological basis was more widespread than what Ms. Goodling described, according to interviews and department statistics.

Figures provided by the department show that from 2003 through 2006, there was a notable increase of hirings from religious-affiliated institutions like Regent University and Ave Maria University. The department hired eight from those two schools in that period, compared to 50 from Harvard and 13 from Yale.

Several career lawyers said that some political appointees favored the religious-oriented employees, intervening to steer $1,000 to $4,000 annual merit bonuses to them.

Ms. Oliveri and several other law professors said placement officers and faculty at their schools found that graduates seeking work at the Justice Department had a better chance by cleansing their résumés of liberal affiliations while emphasizing ties to the Federalist Society, a Washington conservative group, or membership in a religious fellowship.

Ms. Oliveri recalled that when she was hired in 2000 by the Justice Department, she was impressed by the accomplishments of her peers. But once the political appointees controlled the hiring, she said, “The change in the quality of people who were chosen was very pronounced.”

When the front office sent around the résumés of those newly hired for the honors program, she said, “It was obvious what they had: conservative and religious bona fides.”

    Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission, NYT, 14.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/washington/14discrim.html?hp

Bail Rejected in Mansion Slavery Case

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:39 a.m. ET
The New York Times

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) -- A federal judge refused to grant bail to a millionaire couple accused of keeping two Indonesian women as slaves in their mansion for five years, finding that no conditions would be suitable for house arrest.

Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Platt indicated he might be willing to released Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, 35, and Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, 51, on $3.5 million bail if attorneys could agree on house arrest conditions.

The judge held several hearings but ultimately found on Monday that because the Sabhnanis present a ''risk of flight, no such conditions or combination of conditions would adequately assure the presence of the defendants'' at future court dates.

Attorneys for the Sabhnanis said they intend to appeal. The defense has argued that the couple, who run a perfume business from their Muttontown home, frequently traveled and the two Indonesian women could have left at any time.

''This case is long on spin and short on truth,'' said Stephen Scaring, Mahender Sabhnani's lawyer.

The Sabhnanis, U.S. citizens from Indonesia and India, have pleaded not guilty to a federal court indictment accusing them of slavery and harboring undocumented citizens in their Muttontown mansion. Their trial is set for Sept. 10.

They were arrested May 13 after one of the women was found wandering outside a doughnut shop, muttering that she had been injured and wanted to return to her native country. The woman apparently had fled the home that night while putting out the trash, prosecutors said. The second woman was found when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents searched the home.

Both women told prosecutors they had been mentally and physically abused and were paid almost nothing for the services as domestic servants.

The Sabhnanis, in their bid for bail, had agreed to have security officers monitor the entrances and have restrictions on their phone and Internet access. They also would have been subjected to electronic monitoring and only permitted to leave for doctor's appointments or to see their lawyers. The security detail, to be paid by the couple, was estimated at $15,000 a day.

    Bail Rejected in Mansion Slavery Case, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Forced-Labor.html

F.B.I. Agent Tells Padilla Jury of Coded Plans for Jihad

June 9, 2007
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, June 8 — Jurors in the federal terrorism case against Jose Padilla heard his voice for the first time Friday, discussing — by the government’s account — secret plans to travel overseas and wage jihad.

In a decade-old wiretapped conversation, Mr. Padilla, an American convert to Islam, assured Adham Hassoun, the co-defendant accused of recruiting him: “It’s going to happen soon. Trust me.”

The conversation was among more than two dozen that prosecutors played in court this week, mostly between Mr. Hassoun and various men the government says he conspired with. They discussed playing football, going “on the picnic” and smelling “fresh air” — all code for engaging in jihad, said a federal agent serving as a government witness.

Mr. Padilla, Mr. Hassoun and a third defendant, Kifah Jayyousi, are accused of conspiracy to murder, maim and kidnap people abroad. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it recorded some 300,000 calls over years of building evidence for the case; 123 will be played at trial. The voice of Mr. Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who attended a mosque in South Florida in the mid-1990s, is heard in seven conversations.

Mr. Padilla, 36, made international headlines when he was arrested in 2002, accused of planning to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States and called an enemy combatant. But that accusation does not figure into the case here.

The government transferred Mr. Padilla last year from military to civilian custody, adding him to the terrorism conspiracy case of Mr. Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian computer programmer, and Mr. Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born engineer.

The intercepted calls, many in Arabic, are crucial to the government’s case. But on the surface, they seem to have nothing to do with terrorism — one caller, for example, tells Mr. Hassoun of plans to go on a picnic and smell fresh air.

All week, defense lawyers fiercely protested the government’s plan to let an F.B.I. agent who led the investigation tell jurors his interpretation of such words, so-called code for terrorist activities. The agent, John T. Kavanaugh Jr., testified that the defendants spoke in code because they suspected their calls were being monitored.

Judge Marcia G. Cooke responded to the defense by limiting what Mr. Kavanaugh could say about the conversations and telling the jurors his interpretations were nonexpert opinions.

Mr. Padilla mumbled and chuckled throughout the conversation played Friday, sometimes calling Mr. Hassoun “bro.” Mr. Hassoun appeared impatient, asking Mr. Padilla if he was “ready.”

“Inshallah, brother,” Mr. Padilla replied, using the Arabic for “God willing” and urging Mr. Hassoun to have patience. “You know, it’s going to happen.”

Mr. Padilla, who met Mr. Hassoun at the South Florida mosque, is described in the indictment as Mr. Hassoun’s recruit. It says Mr. Padilla traveled to Egypt in 1998 and then to Afghanistan, where he filled out an application to attend a terrorist training camp. The call was recorded in July 1997.

Other calls played Thursday and Friday, as interpreted by Mr. Kavanaugh, focused on jihad activities in Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Kosovo. There was talk of “brothers” who had been “married” — code for killed in battle, Mr. Kavanaugh said — and of interference by “the dogs,” or the United States government.

Mr. Kavanaugh also said a reference to “eating cheese” was code for waging jihad. But he said he had no idea what a reference to a “reservation on the female donkey” meant.

Defense lawyers will probably try to convince jurors that the code theory is nonsense and that the conversations were innocent. In opening arguments last month, they said their clients were merely passionate and vocal Muslims with no connection to Al Qaeda and no intent to support terrorism. The government’s case is politically motivated, they said, and was fueled by the nation’s dread after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“In this case,” Anthony Natale, Mr. Padilla’s lawyer, said in opening arguments, “you will see how in the absence of hard evidence, a suspicion can be fueled by fear, nourished by prejudice and directed by politics into a criminal prosecution.”

The proceedings, almost four weeks along, have been constantly interrupted by defense objections, and Friday was no exception.

The jurors, who include a makeup artist, a software developer and a dispatcher, read transcripts of the tapes as they were played and occasionally took notes. They have not been told of Mr. Padilla’s former status as an enemy combatant, nor his claims that he was tortured while in military custody.

The trial is expected to last months, and Judge Cooke has taken pains to keep jurors happy — letting them take Monday off, for example, because one is getting married over the weekend and wants a break.

Terry Aguayo contributed reporting.

    F.B.I. Agent Tells Padilla Jury of Coded Plans for Jihad, NYT, 9.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/us/09padilla.html

Congressman Pleads Not Guilty to Bribery

June 8, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:22 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Rep. William Jefferson pleaded not guilty Friday to charges of soliciting more than $500,000 in bribes while using his office to broker business deals in Africa.

Jefferson, D-La., said he understood the charges during the federal court hearing. He was released on $100,000 bond.

A 94-page indictment, handed down Monday, details 11 separate bribery schemes and 16 criminal counts, including racketeering, soliciting bribes, wire fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice.

If convicted, Jefferson faces a possible maximum sentence of 235 years. His trial is scheduled for January.

The charges came almost two years after investigators raided Jefferson's home in Washington and found $90,000 in cash stuffed in a box in his freezer.

During Friday's hearing, prosecutor Mark Lytle said the government had compiled evidence filling eight file cabinets and had extensive tape recordings. The prosecution's case could take up to a month to present, he said.

Jefferson, who had been under investigation for more than two years, was re-elected last year. After his indictment, he resigned from the House Small Business Committee while maintaining his innocence.

On Thursday, a federal judge froze Jefferson's assets and the House ethics committee voted to expand its own investigation of Jefferson to include any subject in the 16-count corruption indictment.

Jefferson is the first U.S. official to face charges under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits corporate bribery overseas.

(This version CORRECTS amount allegedly solicited to $500,000)

    Congressman Pleads Not Guilty to Bribery, NYT, 8.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Congressman-Probe.html?hp

Appeals Court Rejects Mich. Abortion Law

June 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:00 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- A federal appeals court Monday rejected Michigan's attempt to ban a procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion, ruling the law unconstitutional because it could also prohibit other abortion procedures.

A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal said the Michigan Legislature would have been ''virtually guaranteed'' a favorable result on appeal had it copied an Ohio law that the 6th Circuit already has upheld.

''It instead opted to use statutory language that pushed almost every boundary that the Supreme Court has imposed for these types of laws,'' the judges said.

Previous attempts by Michigan lawmakers to stop the procedure were struck down by federal courts in 1997 and 2001.

The U.S. Supreme Court in April upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, with the majority opinion carefully distinguishing the controversial procedure from a more common abortion method used in the second trimester of pregnancy. The latter was unaffected by the ruling.

The appeals panel affirmed a Detroit district judge's opinion that the 2004 Legal Birth Definition Act in Michigan places an ''undue burden'' on a woman's right to have an abortion.

Abortion rights groups have said the law -- unlike the federal ban and the law in Ohio - overreached and would have banned pre-viable abortions, including the most common method of second-trimester abortion. The appeals court agreed.

''The Michigan statute contains no similar exception or clear definitions that would avoid sweeping up protected abortion procedures within its prohibition,'' the court wrote.

The Michigan Legislature approved the abortion law in June 2004. Hundreds of thousands of voters signed petitions that allowed the bill to become law with only the approval of the House and Senate -- both of which were controlled by Republicans at the time -- after Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm vetoed it.

    Appeals Court Rejects Mich. Abortion Law, NYT, 4.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Michigan-Abortion.html

Man Described as a Top Spammer Arrested

May 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:46 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SEATTLE (AP) -- A 27-year-old man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.

Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised ''zombie'' computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails.

''He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world,'' said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. ''He's a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day.''

A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.

Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that -- even with four bank accounts seized by the government -- he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer.

He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing Corp.

A public defender who represented him for Wednesday's hearing declined to comment.

Prosecutors say Soloway used computers infected with malicious code to send out millions of junk e-mails since 2003. The computers are called ''zombies'' because owners typically have no idea their machines have been infected.

He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison, though prosecutors said they have not calculated what guideline sentencing range he might face.

The investigation began when the authorities began receiving hundreds of complaints about Soloway, who had been featured on a list of known spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization.

The Santa Barbara County, Calif., Department of Social Services said it was spending $1,000 a week to fight the spam it was receiving, and other businesses and individuals complained of having their reputations damaged when it appeared spam was originating from their computers.

''This is not just a nuisance. This is way beyond a nuisance,'' Warma said.

Soloway used the networks of compromised computers to send out unsolicited bulk e-mails urging people to use his Internet marketing company to advertise their products, authorities said.

People who clicked on a link in the e-mail were directed to his Web site. There, Soloway advertised his ability to send out as many as 20 million e-mail advertisements over 15 days for $495, the indictment said.

The Spamhaus Project rejoiced at his arrest.

''Soloway has been a long-term nuisance on the Internet -- both in terms of the spam he sent, and the people he duped to use his spam service,'' organizers wrote on Spamhaus.org.

Soloway remained in federal detention pending a hearing Monday.

    Man Described as a Top Spammer Arrested, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Spam-Arrest.html

Reputed New York Mob Boss Is Charged

May 31, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:29 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- The reputed head of the Genovese crime family was charged Wednesday with extortion and loansharking as the federal government began a fresh crackdown on what it describes as the most dangerous of the city's five organized crime families.

Danny Leo, alias ''The Lion,'' was held without bail after he was arrested on charges of conspiring with others to extort the owner of a livery car business and an illegal gambling business from 2002 until last November.

The government can prove at trial that Leo is ''the current boss of the Genovese crime family, perhaps the largest and most violent crime family that exists,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Snyder said. As the family's boss, Leo commanded more than 200 members, prosecutors say.

Snyder said the government expected to rewrite the four-page indictment to charge Leo, 65, with racketeering. He said the evidence included proof gathered by a cooperating witness and by a victim who agreed to wear a microphone to record conversations.

The charges are unsubstantiated, said Leo's lawyer, Peter Tsapatsaris. He argued that his client should be freed on bail or limited to home detention because he had only one arrest in his background -- in 1980.

However, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered Leo held without bail after concluding that he was a danger to the community and a threat to engage in or to direct violence.

The indictment accused Leo of threatening the livery car business owner with physical harm if he did not promptly repay loans. It also accused him of threatening to harm two brothers who owned an illegal gambling business in East Harlem if they did not repay loans.

Leo could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

    Reputed New York Mob Boss Is Charged, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mob-Indictment.html

Judge Orders Detainee’s Release

May 31, 2007
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NORFOLK, Va., May 30 (AP) — A Middle Eastern man jailed for nearly four years must be released by June 8 because the government, which wants to deport him, has taken too long to find a country that will take him, a federal judge has ruled.

The judge, Jerome Barry Friedman of Federal District Court here, said in an order issued on Friday that the government violated the constitutional rights of the man, Majed T. Hajbeh, and that he must be released within 14 days.

“The court finds it difficult to conceive how his continued confinement remains reasonable,” Judge Friedman wrote. “There is no significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future.”

Mr. Hajbeh was arrested and detained in 2003 in a sweep of people suspected of immigration violations. An immigration judge ordered him deported, reasoning that Mr. Hajbeh entered incorrect information on papers when entering the United States in 1993. Mr. Hajbeh said he had made a mistake and checked “single” instead of “married.”

The judge did not take into account that Mr. Hajbeh had been acquitted in federal court of a criminal charge of falsifying the document.

The government first tried to deport Mr. Hajbeh to Jordan, where he was convicted in absentia in 1999 of plotting several bombings. The Jordanian government later overturned the convictions of his co-defendants, but Mr. Hajbeh’s stands because he has never returned to Jordan.

Mr. Hajbeh has argued that the conviction was invalid. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security fought to keep him in jail, however, contending he is a danger to the community based on the conviction.

The deportation order was suspended because of evidence that Mr. Hajbeh would face torture if returned to Jordan.

Lawyers for the federal government said officials had been trying to get Israel to take Mr. Hajbeh, a Palestinian by birth who was raised in Jordan. Mr. Hajbeh was a soil engineer before his detention. He had been living in Woodbridge, Va., with his wife and seven children.

    Judge Orders Detainee’s Release, NYT, 31.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/washington/31release.html

Wealthy N.Y. Couple Charged With Slavery

May 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:41 p.m. ET
The New York Times

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) -- A millionaire couple accused of keeping two Indonesian women as slaves in their luxurious Long Island home and abusing them for years have been indicted on federal slavery charges.

Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, 35, and her husband, Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, 51, operate a worldwide perfume business with factories in Singapore and Bahrain.

The two were arrested last week after one of their servants was found wandering outside a doughnut shop on Long Island, wearing only pants and a towel. The woman was believed to have fled the home when she took the trash out the night before.

The couple pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court, and a magistrate judge set bail at $3.5 million and imposed home detention with electronic monitoring.

An indictment handed up Tuesday night formally charged with them with two counts of forced labor and added two counts of harboring illegal residents.

Charles A. Ross, who represents Varsha Sabhnani, has said the couple traveled extensively and that the two Indonesian women were free to leave whenever they wished. He previously described them as ''model citizens'' who ''only want to clear their names.''

Friends and relatives indicated the two would be willing to post bail, but as of Wednesday morning, they remained in custody.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Demitri Jones called the allegations ''truly a case of modern-day slavery.''

The women, prosecutors said, were subjected to beatings, had scalding water thrown on them and were forced to repeatedly climb up stairs as punishment for perceived misdeeds. In one case, prosecutors said, one of the women was forced to eat 25 hot chili peppers at one time.

One of the women also told authorities they were forced to sleep on mats in the kitchen and were fed so little, they had to steal food.

The women legally arrived in the United States on B-1 visas in 2002; the Sabhnanis then confiscated their passports and refused to let them leave their home, authorities said. Identified in court papers as Samirah and Nona, the women said they were promised payments of $200 and $100 a month, but federal prosecutors said they were never given money directly. One of the victims' daughters living in Indonesia was sent $100 a month, prosecutors said.

They have since been cared for by Catholic Charities, according to a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    Wealthy N.Y. Couple Charged With Slavery, NYT, 23.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Forced-Labor.html

Editorial

Why This Scandal Matters

May 21, 2007
The New York Times

As Monica Goodling, a key player in the United States attorney scandal, prepares to testify before Congress on Wednesday, the administration’s strategy is clear. It has offered up implausible excuses, hidden the most damaging evidence and feigned memory lapses, while hoping that the public’s attention moves on. But this scandal is too important for the public or Congress to move on. This story should not end until Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is gone, and the serious damage that has been done to the Justice Department is repaired.

The Justice Department is no ordinary agency. Its 93 United States attorney offices, scattered across the country, prosecute federal crimes ranging from public corruption to terrorism. These prosecutors have enormous power: they can wiretap people’s homes, seize property and put people in jail for life. They can destroy businesses, and affect the outcomes of elections. It has always been understood that although they are appointed by a president, usually from his own party, once in office they must operate in a nonpartisan way, and be insulated from outside pressures.

This understanding has badly broken down. It is now clear that United States attorneys were pressured to act in the interests of the Republican Party, and lost their job if they failed to do so. The firing offenses of the nine prosecutors who were purged last year were that they would not indict Democrats, they investigated important Republicans, or they would not try to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups with baseless election fraud cases.

The degree of partisanship in the department is shocking. A study by two professors, Donald Shields of the University of Missouri at St. Louis and John Cragan of Illinois State University, found that the Bush Justice Department has investigated Democratic officeholders and office seekers about four times as often as Republican ones.

It is hard not to see the fingerprints of Karl Rove. A disproportionate number of the prosecutors pushed out, or considered for dismissal, were in swing states. The main reason for the purge — apart from hobbling a California investigation that has already put one Republican congressman in jail — appears to have been an attempt to tip states like Missouri and Washington to Republican candidates for House, Senate, governor and president.

Justice Department headquarters has become deeply partisan. Young operatives like Ms. Goodling were apparently allowed to hire and promote based on party membership. Political appointees cleared the way for laws designed to disenfranchise minority voters, and brought litigation to remove Democratic-leaning voters from the rolls.

The department’s integrity lies in tatters. As a result of the purge, Tim Griffin, a Republican operative and Karl Rove protégé, was installed as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Arkansas. Rachel Paulose, a 33-year-old Republican activist with thin prosecutorial experience, was assigned to Minnesota. If either indicted a prominent Democrat tomorrow, everyone would believe it was a political hit.

Congress has to save the Justice Department, something President Bush shows no interest in doing. It should pass a resolution of “no confidence” in Mr. Gonzales, and push for his removal. But it also needs to insist on new leadership that will restore the department’s traditions of professionalism and impartiality, and re-establish that in the United States, the legal system does not work to advance the interests of a political party.

    Why This Scandal Matters, NYT, 21.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21mon1.html

Jose Padilla Trial Opens in Miami

May 14, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:24 p.m. ET
The New York Times

MIAMI (AP) -- The trial of suspected al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla opened Monday with federal prosecutors arguing the U.S. citizen and two co-defendants were key players in a terror support cell that provided equipment, money and Islamist fighters to extremist groups around the world.

''The defendants were members of a secret organization, a terrorism support cell, based right here in South Florida,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Frazier told jurors in his opening statement. ''The defendants took concrete steps to support and promote this violence.''

Lawyers for the three defendants were scheduled to deliver their opening statements later Monday in the trial, expected to last into August.

Attorneys on both sides have spent months battling over issues ranging from torture allegations to the meaning of ''jihad.'' They pored over classified material and Arabic translations and traveled overseas to interview witnesses and spent weeks picking a jury.

If convicted, the three defendants could face life in prison.

Padilla, a 36-year-old former Chicago gang member and Muslim convert, has been in federal custody since his 2002 arrest at O'Hare International Airport. He was initially accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive ''dirty bomb'' in the United States and held for 3 1/2 years as an enemy combatant at a Navy brig, but those allegations are not part of the Miami indictment.

He was added to the Miami case in late 2005 amid a legal battle over the president's wartime powers of detention involving U.S. citizens. His lawyers had fought for years to get him before a federal judge.

In court Monday, Frazier told the court that Padilla agreed to be recruited by co-defendant Adham Amin Hassoun as a prospective mujahedeen fighter to be trained by al-Qaida in Afghanistan. ''Jose Padilla was an al-Qaida terrorist trainee providing the ultimate form of material support -- himself,'' Frazier said. ''Padilla was serious, he was focused, he was secretive. Padilla had cut himself off from most things in his life that did not concern is radical view of the Islamic religion.''

Hassoun and the third defendant, Kifah Wael Jayyousi, both 45, provided other Islamist fighter recruits, military equipment and money for conflicts in Lebanon, Chechnya, Somalia and other global hot spots, often using Islamic charitable organizations as a conduit, Frazier said.

The defendants sought separate trials, but their motions were denied by U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke. She ruled the government had ample evidence that the three were connected in a conspiracy, with Hassoun and Jayyousi as jihadist recruiters, fundraisers and suppliers and Padilla as one of their recruits.

To prove a conspiracy, prosecutors will have to show that each of the three was involved in at least one act to provide material support to extremist groups.

In Padilla's case, a key piece of evidence is an application to attend an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan that prosecutors say he completed in July 2000. They also say it bears his fingerprints.

Defense lawyers will seek to raise questions in jurors' minds about the authenticity of the form, whether Padilla actually completed it himself and if there might be an alternative explanation for the presence of the fingerprints.

''The crimes he has been charged with pale in comparison to the initial allegations,'' said University of Miami law professor Stephen Vladeck. ''This is a far cry from being a major front in the government's war on terrorism.''

For Hassoun and Jayyousi, who were under FBI surveillance for much longer than Padilla, the keys may include the jurors' interpretations of hundreds of phone calls intercepted with wiretaps, the purpose of various money transfers, and the meaning of items in Jayyousi's newsletter.

    Jose Padilla Trial Opens in Miami, NYT, 14.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Padilla-Terror-Charges.html

Editorial

A Scandal That Keeps Growing

May 6, 2007
The New York Times

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared recently, while batting down bipartisan calls for him to resign, that he had many things to do and “can’t just be focused on the U.S. attorneys situation.” It’s not surprising that Mr. Gonzales wants to change the subject. At best, the firing of eight United States attorneys, most of them highly respected, is an example of such profound incompetence that it should cost Mr. Gonzales his job. At worst, it was a political purge followed by a cover-up. In either case, the scandal is only getting bigger and more disturbing.

New reports of possible malfeasance keep coming fast and furious. They all seem to make it more likely than ever that the firings were part of an attempt to turn the Justice Department into a partisan political operation. There is, to start, the very strong appearance that United States attorneys were fired because they were investigating powerful Republicans or refused to bring baseless charges against Democrats. There is reason to believe that Carol Lam of San Diego, who put Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman, in jail, and Paul Charlton of Arizona, who was investigating Representative Rick Renzi, among others, were fired simply for their nonpartisan pursuit of justice.

The Justice Department opened an internal investigation last week into whether Monica Goodling, a former senior adviser to Mr. Gonzales, applied a political screen to applicants for assistant United States attorney positions. That kind of political test would violate department policy, and possibly the law. Ms. Goodling, who has invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, was also a key player in the United States attorney firings.

The National Journal brought to light an “internal order” in which Mr. Gonzales gave Ms. Goodling and his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, the power to hire and fire many of the department’s top officials. His willingness to hand this authority off to two young, highly political staff members is further evidence that partisanship and not professionalism was the driving force in hiring and firing.

More testimony has also emerged that undermines the department’s weak claim that the prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance. James Comey, who was deputy attorney general from 2003 to 2005, told a House committee last week that all but one of the prosecutors were worthy of remaining in office. He called Ms. Lam “a fine U.S. attorney” and Mr. Charlton “one of the best.”

Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Sampson and the others have given so many conflicting, barely credible stories for the firings that it is impossible not to suspect a cover-up. Some of the fired prosecutors strengthened that impression last week in written statements to Congress, in which they described being pressured by Michael Elston, an aide to the deputy attorney general, not to talk about their dismissals. John McKay, of Seattle, said his impression was that “Mr. Elston’s tone was sinister” and that he was “prepared to threaten me further if he concluded I did not intend to continue to remain silent about my dismissal.”

In her statement, Ms. Lam said that she was given just weeks to pack up, and that Justice Department officials told her that her dismissal came “from the very highest levels of the government.”

It is long past time for President Bush to fire Mr. Gonzales. But Congress, especially the Republicans who have dared confront the White House on this issue, should not be satisfied with that. There are strong indications that the purge was ordered out of the White House, involving at the very least the former counsel, Harriet Miers, and Karl Rove.

It is the duty of Congress to compel them and other officials to finally tell the truth to the American people.

    A Scandal That Keeps Growing, NYT, 6.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/opinion/06sun1.html

A Liberal Case for Gun Rights Helps Sway Judiciary

May 6, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

The first two editions of Professor Tribe’s influential treatise on constitutional law, in 1978 and 1988, endorsed the collective rights view. The latest, published in 2000, sets out his current interpretation.

Several other leading liberal constitutional scholars, notably Akhil Reed Amar at Yale and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas, are in broad agreement favoring an individual rights interpretation. Their work has in a remarkably short time upended the conventional understanding of the Second Amendment, and it set the stage for the Parker decision.

The earlier consensus, the law professors said in interviews, reflected received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution. “The standard liberal position,” Professor Levinson said, “is that the Second Amendment is basically just read out of the Constitution.”

The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” (Some transcriptions of the amendment omit the last comma.)

If only as a matter of consistency, Professor Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations of other amendments in the Bill of Rights, like those protecting free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, should also embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment. And just as the First Amendment’s protection of the right to free speech is not absolute, the professors say, the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms may be limited by the government, though only for good reason.

The individual rights view is far from universally accepted. “The overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion supports the near-unanimous view of the federal courts that the constitutional right to be armed is linked to an organized militia,” said Dennis A. Henigan, director of the legal action project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “The exceptions attract attention precisely because they are so rare and unexpected.”

Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.

“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”

If the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit does not step in and reverse the 2-to-1 panel decision striking down a law that forbids residents to keep handguns in their homes, the question of the meaning of the Second Amendment is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court. The answer there is far from certain.

That too is a change. In 1992, Warren E. Burger, a former chief justice of the United States appointed by President Richard M. Nixon, expressed the prevailing view.

“The Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all,” Mr. Burger said in a speech. In a 1991 interview, Mr. Burger called the individual rights view “one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Even as he spoke, though, the ground was shifting underneath him. In 1989, in what most authorities say was the beginning of the modern era of mainstream Second Amendment scholarship, Professor Levinson published an article in The Yale Law Journal called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

“The Levinson piece was very much a turning point,” said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. “He was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as “an A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.”

Robert A. Levy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian group that supports gun rights, and a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Parker case, said four factors accounted for the success of the suit. The first, Mr. Levy said, was “the shift in scholarship toward an individual rights view, particularly from liberals.”

He also cited empirical research questioning whether gun control laws cut down on crime; a 2001 decision from the federal appeals court in New Orleans that embraced the individual rights view even as it allowed a gun prosecution to go forward; and the Bush administration’s reversal of a longstanding Justice Department position under administrations of both political parties favoring the collective rights view.

Filing suit in the District of Columbia was a conscious decision, too, Mr. Levy said. The gun law there is one of the most restrictive in the nation, and questions about the applicability of the Second Amendment to state laws were avoided because the district is governed by federal law.

“We wanted to proceed very much like the N.A.A.C.P.,” Mr. Levy said, referring to that group’s methodical litigation strategy intended to do away with segregated schools.

Professor Bogus, a supporter of the collective rights view, said the Parker decision represented a milestone in that strategy. “This is the story of an enormously successful and dogged campaign to change the conventional view of the right to bear arms,” he said.

The text of the amendment is not a model of clarity, and arguments over its meaning tend to be concerned with whether the first part of the sentence limits the second. The history of its drafting and contemporary meaning provide support for both sides as well.

The Supreme Court has not decided a Second Amendment case since 1939. That ruling was, as Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a liberal judge on the federal appeals court in San Francisco acknowledged in 2002, “somewhat cryptic,” again allowing both sides to argue that Supreme Court precedent aided their interpretation of the amendment.

Still, nine federal appeals courts around the nation have adopted the collective rights view, opposing the notion that the amendment protects individual gun rights. The only exceptions are the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, and the District of Columbia Circuit. The Second Circuit, in New York, has not addressed the question.

Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.

“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”

The decision in Parker has been stayed while the full appeals court decides whether to rehear the case.

Should the case reach the Supreme Court, Professor Tribe said, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

    A Liberal Case for Gun Rights Helps Sway Judiciary, NYT, 6.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/us/06firearms.html?hp

Many Detainees at Guantánamo Rebuff Lawyers

May 5, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Many of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are no longer cooperating with their lawyers, adding a largely invisible struggle between the lawyers and their own clients to the legal battle over the Bush administration’s detention policies.

Some detainees refuse to see their lawyers, while others decline mail from their lawyers or refuse to provide them information on their cases, according to court documents, writings of some of the detainees and recent interviews.

The detainees’ resistance appears to have been fueled by frustration over their long detention and suspicion about whether their lawyers are working for the government, as well as anti-American sentiment, some of the documents and interviews show. “Your role is to polish Bush’s shoes and make the picture look good,” a Yemeni detainee, Adnan Farhan Abdullatif, 31, wrote his lawyer in February.

Some of the lawyers accuse Guantánamo officials of feeding the detainees’ suspicions of the lawyers, a charge Pentagon officials deny.

Lawyers said many of the relationships appeared to have deteriorated as the detainees’ legal cause has suffered setbacks in Congress and the courts, and as Justice Department officials have begun efforts to limit lawyers’ access to detainees, raising new concerns among the detainees about their lawyers’ effectiveness.

“Every lawyer is afraid, every time they go down there, that their clients won’t see them,” said Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law who represents two Guantánamo detainees. “And it’s getting worse, because it’s pretty hard to say we’re offering them anything.”

The situation is awkward for the lawyers, who have become a considerable force not only in the courts but also in legislative, diplomatic and public debates about detention policies. Tense relationships or outright resistance from their clients could undercut their credibility and complicate their legal work.

The Justice Department, in a recent court filing, asked a federal appeals court to limit the number of times lawyers challenging detention could visit detainees and to allow officials to read lawyers’ mail to detainees. Some of the lawyers said that court fight would be likely to further weaken their ties to some detainees because it raised questions about whether their communications would be confidential and whether they would be able to continue to see their clients.

Some detainees are clearly cooperating with their lawyers and are engaged in regular dialogue with them. In interviews, some lawyers denied there were problems in their relationships with detainees or declined to discuss the difficulties, saying such information would embolden the government. But other lawyers estimated that a third or more of the detainees who have worked with lawyers in cases challenging their detention were now resisting cooperating with them.

Of 10 detainees publicly identified by military prosecutors as targets of possible war-crimes charges, many, if not most, either have refused American lawyers or are now uncooperative or uncommunicative, four of the lawyers involved in the war crimes cases said. Some of those detainees face possible life sentences.

“The relationship of the lawyers with many of the clients who still see us is very strained and tense,” said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer at Covington & Burling, who represents 17 Yemeni detainees in efforts to challenge their detention.

At times, the lawyer-client battles provide an insight into detainees’ attitudes. Mr. Remes said one client grew furious when he learned his lawyers had interviewed his family members in Yemen to gather information for his case. The detainee assumed, Mr. Remes said, that his lawyers were acting as investigators for the American government.

Mr. Denbeaux said one client had pleaded with him to bring toothpaste. When he did on a later visit, military guards confiscated it and his client took that as proof that the lawyer was powerless. “I said, ‘They took it from me,’ ” Mr. Denbeaux recalled, “and he said: ‘What good are you? You can’t even get me toothpaste.’ ”

Neal R. Sonnett, a Miami lawyer who has been an American Bar Association observer at Guantánamo, said the deterioration of the relationships could become an issue as courts continue to sort through the thicket of legal questions presented by the administration’s detention policies. “Due process,” he said, “includes the ability of the lawyers to effectively prepare their cases.”

A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, declined to comment.

In the interviews, lawyers described differing reasons for the resistance from their clients, including what several lawyers described as depression or other mental illness, or resignation more than five years after the United States naval base at Guantánamo was opened as a detention camp.

Several said there had been cycles of wariness and peer pressure to reject American lawyers. Some of the lawyers said a new cycle might have gained intensity after a federal appeals court in February approved legislation Congress passed last year intended to strip the courts of the power to hear the habeas corpus cases, the main legal vehicle many of the lawyers had used to try to challenge their clients’ detention. Last month, the Supreme Court declined to review that ruling.

Some of the detainees’ comments, in writings given to the lawyers or recorded in their declassified notes, showed confusion about what role the lawyers were playing. Mohammed Nasser Yahia Abdullah Khussrof, a 61-year-old Yemeni, explained a common suspicion of the lawyers among the detainees.

“Some people don’t have full trust in attorneys,” Mr. Khussrof said, according to Mr. Remes’s notes. “They think you work for government.”

Several lawyers noted that in the war-crimes cases, defendants were assigned military lawyers who visit them dressed in uniforms similar to those of some of the jailers.

Clive A. Stafford Smith, a lawyer who represents 35 detainees, said one of his clients, Omar Deghayes, a Libyan, had said that in lawyer-client meetings at Guantánamo, “we all know that everything we say in these rooms is being monitored by them.” Military officials say they do not eavesdrop on those meetings.

Mr. Stafford Smith also said several of his clients had described what he said were efforts by Guantánamo officials to foster detainees’ distrust of the lawyers. He said detainees had described investigators’ telling them that their lawyers were Jewish or gay or that prisoners with lawyers were less likely to be released than those without them.

Mr. Stafford Smith and other lawyers also said clients had told them of investigators who posed as lawyers and then questioned detainees.

The military spokesman in Guantánamo, Cmdr. Richard W. Haupt, said each of those accusations was false. “It is our policy to in no way interfere with legal counsel,” he said. He said that military officials had worked to make it as easy as possible for lawyers to visit detainees and that there had been an increase in such meetings this year.

Court records show that the detainees’ concerns about whether lawyers’ mail will remain confidential may be based, in part, on experience. Officials acknowledged in court last year that during an investigation after three suicides at Guantánamo in June they seized written materials and personal items from all detainees, a total of more than 1,100 pounds, “including legal material and other correspondence.”

Although the detainees’ lawyers have had some notable successes in American courts, no detainee has been freed as a result of a court order. Some have come to rely on the lawyers as their only conduit to the outside world. But even in that capacity, the lawyers said, military rules have often made it impossible for them to satisfy simple requests.

Mr. Remes, the Washington lawyer for the 17 Yemenis, said military officials had barred lawyers from giving detainees rudimentary reading materials, including a Dr. Seuss book and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Commander Haupt said lawyers were permitted to provide “properly cleared” reading material to the detention camp library.

Joseph Margulies, a detainee’s lawyer who teaches at Northwestern University School of Law, said the growing skepticism of some detainees was not surprising. “They don’t trust that we will be able to accomplish anything,” he said.

    Many Detainees at Guantánamo Rebuff Lawyers, NYT, 5.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/washington/05gitmo.html?hp

Op-Ed Contributor

He’s Impeachable, You Know

May 3, 2007
The New York Times
By FRANK BOWMAN

Columbia, Mo.

IF Alberto Gonzales will not resign, Congress should impeach him. Article II of the Constitution grants Congress the power to impeach “the president, the vice president and all civil officers of the United States.” The phrase “civil officers” includes the members of the cabinet (one of whom, Secretary of War William Belknap, was impeached in 1876).

Impeachment is in bad odor in these post-Clinton days. It needn’t be. Though provoked by individual misconduct, the power to impeach is at bottom a tool granted Congress to defend the constitutional order. Mr. Gonzales’s behavior in the United States attorney affair is of a piece with his role as facilitator of this administration’s claims of unreviewable executive power.

A cabinet officer, like a judge or a president, may be impeached only for commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But as the Nixon and Clinton impeachment debates reminded us, that constitutional phrase embraces not only indictable crimes but “conduct ... grossly incompatible with the office held and subversive of that office and of our constitutional system of government.”

United States attorneys, though subject to confirmation by the Senate, serve at the pleasure of the president. As a constitutional matter, the president is at perfect liberty to fire all or some of them whenever it suits him. He can fire them for mismanagement, for failing to pursue administration priorities with sufficient vigor, or even because he would prefer to replace an incumbent with a political crony. Indeed, a president could, without exceeding his constitutional authority and (probably) without violating any statute, fire a United States attorney for pursuing officeholders of the president’s party too aggressively or for failing to prosecute officeholders of the other party aggressively enough.

That the president has the constitutional power to do these things does not mean he has the right to do them without explanation. Congress has the right to demand explanations for the president’s managerial choices, both to exercise its own oversight function and to inform the voters its members represent.

The right of Congress to demand explanations imposes on the president, and on inferior executive officers who speak for him, the obligation to be truthful. An attorney general called before Congress to discuss the workings of the Justice Department can claim the protection of “executive privilege” and, if challenged, can defend the (doubtful) legitimacy of such a claim in the courts. But having elected to testify, he has no right to lie, either by affirmatively misrepresenting facts or by falsely claiming not to remember events. Lying to Congress is a felony — actually three felonies: perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice.

A false claim not to remember is just as much a lie as a conscious misrepresentation of a fact one remembers well. Instances of phony forgetfulness seem to abound throughout Mr. Gonzales’s testimony, but his claim to have no memory of the November Justice department meeting at which he authorized the attorney firings left even Republican stalwarts like Jeff Sessions of Alabama gaping in incredulity. The truth is almost surely that Mr. Gonzales’s forgetfulness is feigned — a calculated ploy to block legitimate Congressional inquiry into questionable decisions made by the Department of Justice, White House officials and, quite possibly, the president himself.

Even if perjury were not a felony, lying to Congress has always been understood to be an impeachable offense. As James Iredell, later a Supreme Court justice, said in 1788 during the debate over the impeachment clause, “The president must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.” The same is true of the president’s appointees.

The president may yet yield and send Mr. Gonzales packing. If not, Democrats may decide that to impeach Alberto Gonzales would be politically unwise. But before dismissing the possibility of impeachment, Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf.

Frank Bowman is a law professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

    He’s Impeachable, You Know, NYT, 3.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/opinion/03bowman.html

U.S. Proposal Could Block Gun Buyers Tied to Terror

April 27, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

WASHINGTON, April 26 — The Justice Department proposed legislation on Thursday that would give the attorney general discretion to bar terrorism suspects from buying firearms, seeking to close a gap in federal gun laws.

The measure, which was introduced by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, would give the attorney general authority to deny a firearm purchase if the buyer was found “to be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism.”

Suspects on federal watch lists can now legally buy firearms in the United States if background checks do not turn up any standard prohibitions for gun buyers, which include felony convictions, illegal immigration status or involuntary commitments for mental illness.

But since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, local law enforcement officials and gun control advocates have raised concerns that terrorists might exploit loopholes to buy weapons.

John Ashcroft, the former attorney general and a staunch supporter of gun rights, blocked the Federal Bureau of Investigation from comparing federal gun-buying records against a list of suspects detained as part of the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Ashcroft cited the Brady gun law, which sets out the federal system for background checks, arguing that it prohibited sharing such information for other law enforcement purposes.

In 2004, the F.B.I. instituted a new system that alerted counterterrorism officials when a terrorism suspect tried to buy a gun, giving them three days to find information to disqualify the suspect under the standard federal prohibitions. If the transaction was successful, details like the type of weapon and the place of purchase could not be shared. But if the purchase was blocked, the information could be turned over.

At the request of Mr. Lautenberg, who has long been vocal on the issue, the Government Accountability Office looked into the matter in 2005. It found that federal law enforcement officials approved 47 of 58 gun applications from terrorism suspects over a nine-month period.

Mr. Lautenberg introduced legislation to address the issue, but it stalled in the Republican-controlled Congress. His aides said Thursday that they believed things would turn out differently with backing from the Bush administration and with a Democratic majority in Congress.

But gun control is a touchy issue for Democrats, with many new lawmakers elected on pro-gun stances.

Mr. Lautenberg, who noted that the bill was only being proposed in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, promised to push it swiftly to the floor.

“It took years, but the administration finally realized that letting terrorists buy guns is dangerous,” he said in a statement.

Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, declined to comment on the legislation on Thursday, saying lawyers had not had time to review it.

After the Government Accountability Office report, the Justice Department created a study group on the issue. Nearly two years later, after repeated inquiries from lawmakers, Richard A. Hertling, acting assistant attorney general, wrote to Mr. Lautenberg in February saying that steps had been taken to address certain concerns, including encouraging investigators to visit gun dealers and review firearms applications every time a terrorism suspect was flagged trying to buy a weapon.

A letter signed by Mr. Hertling that accompanied the proposed legislation on Thursday said that in some situations it would be “counterproductive” to deny firearms permits for terrorism suspects, because that might alert them to official interest in their activities.

The legislation also establishes procedures for appealing a decision by the attorney general.

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the process took time because it involved delicate issues, including “the protection of sensitive information upon which terrorist watch listings are based, as well as due process safeguards that afford the affected individual an appropriate opportunity to challenge the denial after it is made.”

    U.S. Proposal Could Block Gun Buyers Tied to Terror, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/washington/27guns.html

Editorial

After the Lawyers

April 27, 2007
The New York Times

It can be hard to tell whom the Bush administration considers more of an enemy at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp: the prisoners or the lawyers.

William Glaberson reported in The Times yesterday that the Justice Department had asked a federal appeals court to remove some of the last shreds of legal representation available to the prisoners.

The government wants the court to allow intelligence and military officers to read the mail sent by lawyers to their clients at Guantánamo Bay. Lawyers would also be limited to three visits with each client, and an inmate would be allowed only a single visit to decide whether to authorize an attorney to handle his case. Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay have a history of masking their identities, so the rule would make it much harder than it already is to gain the trust of a prisoner.

Perhaps the most outrageous of the Justice Department’s proposals would allow government officials — on their own authority — to deny lawyers access to the evidence used to decide whether an inmate is an illegal enemy combatant. Not even the appalling Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through in the last days of the Republican-controlled Congress, goes that far.

The filing, with the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., says lawyers have caused unrest among the prisoners and improperly relayed messages to the news media. The administration offered no evidence for these charges, probably because there is none. This is an assault on the integrity of the lawyers, reminiscent of a former Pentagon official’s suggestion that they are unpatriotic and that American corporations should boycott their firms.

The Justice Department also said lawyers had no right to demand access to clients at Guantánamo Bay because the clients are “detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country.”

The Supreme Court has already rejected that argument, and President Bush can hardly be worried about the sensibilities of Fidel Castro’s government. (The camp is on land leased to Washington after the Spanish-American War.)

It’s obvious why the administration is attacking the lawyers. It does not want the world to know more than it already does about this immoral detention camp. And brave lawyers have helped expose abuse and torture there, as well as detentions of innocent men — who are a large portion, if not a majority, of the inmates at Guantánamo Bay. The Bush administration does not want these issues aired in public, and certainly not in court.

Mr. Bush thinks that he has the right to ignore the Constitution when it suits him. But this is a nation of laws, not the whims of men, and giving legal rights to the guilty as well as the innocent is a price of true justice. The only remedy is for lawmakers to rewrite the Military Commissions Act to restore basic rights to Guantánamo Bay and to impose full accountability for what has happened there.

    After the Lawyers, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/opinion/27fri1.html

U.S. Asks Court to Limit Lawyers at Guantánamo

April 26, 2007
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to impose tighter restrictions on the hundreds of lawyers who represent detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the request has become a central issue in a new legal battle over the administration’s detention policies.

Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail have caused “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo,” a Justice Department filing proposes new limits on the lawyers’ contact with their clients and access to evidence in their cases that would replace more expansive rules that have governed them since they began visiting Guantánamo detainees in large numbers in 2004.

The filing says the lawyers have caused unrest among the detainees and have improperly served as a conduit to the news media, assertions that have drawn angry responses from some of the lawyers.

The dispute is the latest and perhaps the most significant clash over the role of lawyers for the detainees. “There is no right on the part of counsel to access to detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country,” the Justice Department filing argued.

Under the proposal, filed this month in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the government would limit lawyers to three visits with an existing client at Guantánamo; there is now no limit. It would permit only a single visit with a detainee to have him authorize a lawyer to handle his case. And it would permit a team of intelligence officers and military lawyers not involved in a detainee’s case to read mail sent to him by his lawyer.

The proposal would also reverse existing rules to permit government officials, on their own, to deny the lawyers access to secret evidence used by military panels to determine that their clients were enemy combatants.

Many of the lawyers say the restrictions would make it impossible to represent their clients, or even to convince wary detainees — in a single visit — that they were really lawyers, rather than interrogators.

Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a lawyer who has helped to coordinate strategy for the detainees, said the government was trying to disrupt relationships between the lawyers and their clients and to stop the flow of public information about Guantánamo, which he described as a “legal black hole” before the courts permitted access for the lawyers in 2004.

“These rules,” Mr. Hafetz said, “are an effort to restore Guantánamo to its prior status as a legal black hole.”

The dispute comes in a case in which detainees are challenging decisions by military panels that they were properly held as enemy combatants. The Justice Department’s proposed rules could apply to similar cases that lawyers say are likely to eventually involve as many as 300 of the roughly 385 detainees now held at Guantánamo.

Some of the detainees’ lawyers say the Justice Department proposal is only the latest indication of a long effort to blunt their effectiveness, which they say was evident in statements of a senior Pentagon official early this year. The official, Charles D. Stimson, deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, resigned after he was criticized for suggesting that corporations should consider severing business ties with law firms that represented Guantánamo detainees.

Under the current rules, legal mail is inspected for contraband but is not read. The lawyers, who have security clearances, are presumed to be entitled to review classified evidence used against their clients.

There is no limit on the number of times lawyers can visit their clients. Some say that they have been to Guantánamo 10 or more times and that they have needed the time to work with clients who are often suspicious and withdrawn.

Justice Department officials would not comment on the proposal, which is scheduled to be the subject of a court hearing on May 15.

The filing used combative language, saying lawyers had been able to “cause unrest on the base” and mentioned hunger strikes, protests and disobedience. An affidavit by a Navy lawyer at Guantánamo, Cmdr. Patrick M. McCarthy, that accompanied the filing, said lawyers had gathered information from the detainees for news organizations. Commander McCarthy also said the lawyers had provided detainees with accounts of events outside Guantánamo, like a speech at an Amnesty International conference and details of terrorist attacks.

“Such information,” his affidavit said, “threatens the security of the camp, as it could incite violence among the detainees.”

Several detainees’ lawyers involved in some of the incidents denied that they had caused security problems. Neil H. Koslowe, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, called the assertion a “McCarthy-era charge” that was not supported by the evidence.

The dispute over the lawyers’ role is one of the first issues the appeals court in Washington will have to decide as it opens a new chapter of the legal battle over Guantánamo. In 2005, Congress designated that court as the forum for detainees to challenge directly decisions made by the Pentagon’s combatant status review tribunals designating them as enemy combatants.

But many detainees’ lawyers have resisted filing petitions to review those decisions because Congress narrowly defined the arguments the appeals court could consider. The law said the court could review whether a panel’s decision “was consistent with the standards and procedures” set forth by the Pentagon.

Instead, many detainees’ lawyers pursued habeas corpus petitions, using the centuries-old legal proceeding to ask a judge for release from imprisonment. But after a complex trip through the courts, Congress last year passed a provision intended to strip courts of the authority to hear habeas corpus cases involving Guantánamo detainees.

A divided panel of the federal appeals court in Washington upheld that provision in February. And early this month, the United States Supreme Court declined to review that decision. Two justices, John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy, said that before the Supreme Court could again consider whether Congress was permitted to strip the courts of the ability to consider the habeas corpus cases, the detainees had to try to complete the appeals court review of their enemy combatant decisions.

As a result, much of the focus in the legal battle is now shifting to the appeals court. Scores of petitions seeking review of the combatant-status rulings are expected to be filed in the coming weeks, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, an advocacy group that has been coordinating the detainees’ lawyers. The May 15 arguments will focus on rules that could apply to all of those cases.

Lawyers say they are pressing ahead with the more limited review process in the appeals court as part of an effort to set the stage for a return to the Supreme Court. Some lawyers said that while they may lose, that would allow them to argue to the Supreme Court that the reviews were so limited that the detainees needed the more sweeping consideration permitted in habeas corpus cases.

But government lawyers, too, are developing new strategies in the wake of the Supreme Court action this month. They say that Congress and the courts have determined that expansive habeas corpus petitions are not available to the detainees.

As a result, they say, rules like those that allowed unlimited visits with detainees are no longer necessary as the detainees pursue the more limited appeals court review.

But, while arguing that detainees have no right to lawyers, the Justice Department filing said the government was giving the Guantánamo detainees enough access to lawyers so that “the court’s review will be assisted by having informed counsel.”

    U.S. Asks Court to Limit Lawyers at Guantánamo, NYT, 26.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/washington/26gitmo.html?hp

Judge: No Religion at Post Office

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:50 a.m. ET
The New York Times

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Religion has no place in post offices run by churches and other private contractors, a federal judge has ruled, citing the constitutional separation of church and state.

U.S. District Judge Dominic J. Squatrito, in a case involving a church-run post office in Manchester, ordered the Postal Service to notify the nearly 5,200 facilities run by contractors that they cannot promote religion through pamphlets, displays or any other materials.

He also told the agency to monitor those offices, which are distinguishable from government-run facilities and employ workers who are not Postal Service employees, to make sure they comply with his ruling.

Postal officials said they could not immediately comment on the ruling, which is dated April 18.

''We're carefully reviewing the decision and considering our options, including an appeal,'' said Gerry McKiernan, a Postal Service spokesman at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Squatrito sided with Bertram Cooper, who in 2003 sued the Postal Service and the Full Gospel Interdenominational Church, which operates the Sincerely Yours Inc. post office on Main Street in downtown Manchester.

When he filed the lawsuit, Cooper, a Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War, said he became upset when he went to Sincerely Yours.

''I'm walking into a place that's doing government business -- selling stamps, mailing parcels and so forth -- and they're doing this religious bit,'' Cooper, who is Jewish, said in 2003. His phone number is not listed, and he could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

The Manchester office has a label on an exterior wall with the Postal Service's eagle symbol indicating it is a contract postal unit, along with a Sincerely Yours sign over the threshold.

Inside, the facility has evangelical displays, including posters, advertisements and artwork. One of the displays is about Jesus Christ and invites customers to submit a request if they ''need a prayer in their lives.''

The office has prayer cards and an advertisement for a mission run by the Full Gospel Interdenominational Church that receives profits from the post office. There is a television monitor for church-related religious videos.

There is also a sign saying the Postal Service does not endorse the religious viewpoints expressed in the materials in the office.

A worker at the office referred questions to church officials, who did not return a message seeking comment Tuesday.

''There is nothing wrong, per se, with the church exhibiting religious displays,'' Squatrito wrote in his ruling. ''Here, however, the church is exhibiting such displays while it is performing its duties under a contract with the Postal Service., i.e. the U.S. Government.''

Squatrito said that the post office was a state ''actor'' under the First Amendment and that its religious displays violate the clause calling for the separation of church and state. But he said the contract itself does not violate the clause.

Manchester Postmaster Ronald Boyne, who also was a defendant, declined to comment.

The Postal Service had argued that signs make it clear that Sincerely Yours is not an ''official'' postal facility. It also said that it had no proprietary interest in the office, other than postal products and equipment, and that there was no evidence that the agency had a direct financial stake in the office's success.

The agency noted that no government employees work at Sincerely Yours, and insisted the facts demonstrate that the post office is a private entity.

The judge said the Postal Service relies on contractor-run offices to provide services to areas that the agency has determined to be unsuitable for official facilities. Contract offices are typically at colleges, grocery stores, pharmacies and some private residences.

    Judge: No Religion at Post Office, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Postal-Church.html

Judge in Whitewater trials dies in Arkansas

Sat Apr 21, 2007
10:14PM EDT
Reuters

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (Reuters) - Federal District Judge George Howard, who came to national attention when he presided over the trials of President Bill Clinton's business partners in the Whitewater investigations, died on Saturday at his home in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He was 82.

In 1996 Howard heard the trial of Jim McDougal and his former wife, Susan, and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker of Arkansas, who were accused of fraud and conspiracy in connection with a real estate investment in which Clinton his wife, Hillary, had been partners.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is now a U.S. senator from New York and the Democratic front-runner in the 2008 race for the White House.

The former president was ordered to testify and was questioned at the White House by prosecutors and defense attorneys. The videotape was played for the jury.

All three defendants were convicted, but no criminal charges were ever brought against the Clintons.

However, a special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, later revealed a sexual relationship between Clinton and a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, that led to his impeachment.

The president was subsequently acquitted in a Senate trial.

Howard became the first black federal judge in Arkansas when he was appointed to the bench in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter.

"He was a trailblazer for African-Americans in Arkansas, and a great American," said Judge Susan Webber Wright, a colleague on the federal bench in Arkansas.

The cause of death was not made known.

    Judge in Whitewater trials dies in Arkansas, R, 21.4.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2121168320070422

Ga. Dad Gets 5 Years for Poisoning Soup

April 20, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:34 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- A Georgia man who admitted that he poisoned his children's soup in an attemt to get money from the Campbell Soup Co. was sentenced Thursday to five years in federal prison. U.S. District Judge Julie Carnes also ordered William Allen Cunningham, 41, of Stockbridge to have no further contact with the children or his ex-wife.

Cunningham pleaded guilty Feb. 6 to a charge of communicating false claims by putting in a call to Campbell Soup threatening to sue because the soup was contaminated.

His 3-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter were hospitalized twice in January 2006. Authorities said the first time he had forced them to eat soup laced with hot peppers and lighter fluid and the second time he used the prescription drugs Prozac and Amitriptyline -- both used to treat depression -- to poison the children.

Cunningham was arrested two months later. His wife, Rhonda, filed for divorce on May 6 and served Cunningham the papers at the Clayton County Jail.

    Ga. Dad Gets 5 Years for Poisoning Soup, NYT, 20.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Tampered-Soup-Children.html

Ex-Chief at Qwest Found Guilty of Insider Trading

April 20, 2007
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

DENVER, April 19 — Joseph P. Nacchio, the former chief executive who transformed Qwest Communications International into a major telecommunications rival, was convicted Thursday of insider trading.

A jury in Federal District Court deliberated six days before finding Mr. Nacchio guilty on 19 of 42 counts of insider trading. He was found not guilty of 23 counts of insider trading. The eight men and four women on the jury listened as witnesses testified during the 15-day trial that Mr. Nacchio had exaggerated financial forecasts while concealing Qwest’s growing troubles.

Mr. Nacchio, 57, who was released on $2 million bond, offered a slight smile as he left the courtroom. He declined to comment as he locked arms with his wife and son and walked away. He faces up to 10 years in prison and up to $1 million per count, as well as forfeiture of assets.

The judge, Edward W. Nottingham, set sentencing for July 27.

Earlier, before a packed courtroom, Judge Nottingham methodically read each count. “Not guilty,” he said on Count 1, then repeated the phrase 22 times. Mr. Nacchio’s son Michael began sobbing, piercing an otherwise hushed courtroom. The defendant and his lawyers stared straight ahead; prosecutors sat stoic.

On Count 24, the words and mood changed. “Guilty,” the judge said, saying it again 18 times. The younger Mr. Nacchio turned somber. A defense lawyer glanced back at the Nacchio family and shook his head.

Prosecutors said that counts 24 through 42 — the ones Mr. Nacchio was convicted of — were the most important because they represented $52 million worth of stock sales he made after a trading window opened in 2001.

After the trial, Mr. Nacchio’s lawyer, Herbert J. Stern, said that he would appeal.

The prosecution team stood outside the courthouse amid a thicket of reporters and cameras.

“Convicted felon Joe Nacchio has a very nice ring to it,” the United States attorney for Colorado, Troy A. Eid, said. “I couldn’t be happier that after five and half years, justice has finally been served.”

An assistant United States attorney, Cliff Stricklin, who led the prosecution, said the jury’s verdict proved that “insider trading is not a victimless crime.”

A fellow federal prosecutor, Colleen Conry, said the verdict would ring out from Denver to Wall Street.

At a later hearing now that the trial has ended, the judge will rule on a prosecution request that Mr. Nacchio forfeit his assets.

A former financial adviser to Mr. Nacchio testified at the trial that the executive’s net worth was $536 million at the time of the stock sales in 2001 — testimony that defense lawyers had tried to have stricken as irrelevant and prejudicial.

The charges against Mr. Nacchio related to his sale of more than $100 million worth of Qwest stock in 2001. The case emerged from a federal investigation into accounting practices at Qwest, based in Denver, a telephone service provider in 14 states, mostly in the West.

During the trial, which began in March, federal prosecutors sought to portray Mr. Nacchio as a man motivated by greed who knowingly deceived analysts by concealing the company’s mounting money problems, while simultaneously unloading his own stock options.

Mr. Nacchio’s defense team was led by Mr. Stern, a prominent lawyer who, as a young Manhattan prosecutor, helped investigate the murder of Malcolm X and who was praised for cracking down on political corruption as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey in the 1970s.

Mr. Stern contended that Mr. Nacchio was a passionately optimistic executive who may have misjudged Qwest’s financial future but who believed deeply in his upbeat prognostications. Moreover, Mr. Stern asserted that Mr. Nacchio had needed to sell stock because the options were scheduled to expire.

But Mr. Nacchio, prosecutors said, set aggressive financial targets that were wildly out of step with the warnings he received from fellow executives about Qwest’s failure to increase its recurring revenue.

Several former Qwest executives, including Lee Wolfe, a former director of investor relations, testified about a surge of concern over how the company was going to meet its projections and over Qwest’s lopsided reliance on one-time transactions.

Nonetheless, prosecutors said, Mr. Nacchio continually affirmed a bright financial forecast to analysts, even as the chorus of admonitions from other Qwest executives grew. Finally, in 2001, when he realized Qwest was facing a significant shortfall, prosecutors said, Mr. Nacchio began unloading his stock options, while still publicly proclaiming the company’s good fortunes. Mr. Nacchio even backdated the sale of the stock to make it appear unrelated to Qwest’s downturn, prosecutors contended.

Mr. Stern argued that Mr. Nacchio had derived his projections from a report compiled by a consulting firm hired to assess the merger of Qwest and US West in 1999. There was no way Mr. Nacchio could have foreseen a recession in the market, Mr. Stern said.

The defense called three witnesses, one of them Philip F. Anschutz, Qwest’s founder. Mr. Anschutz testified that Mr. Nacchio had come to him despondent over the attempted suicide of one of his sons and wanted to resign, an indication of the enormous pressure Mr. Nacchio was under at the time of the stock sales, the defense said.

Under Judge Nottingham, who was considered a stickler for punctuality, the trial moved more swiftly than expected. As the proceedings drew to a close, there was speculation as to whether Mr. Nacchio would take the stand to testify about secret government contracts that Qwest was supposedly in line to win.

Before the trial, the defense indicated that Mr. Nacchio alone knew about the potentially lucrative contracts, which would have bolstered Qwest’s revenues.

But the defense never called Mr. Nacchio; putting him on the stand could have proved risky because he would have faced a relentless cross-examination, legal experts said. As a result, the government contracts were barely mentioned.

The federal charges capped a sharp turn of fortune for Mr. Nacchio, the son of a New York longshoreman turned bartender, once heralded for his hard-charging leadership as an executive for AT&T.

Hired to lead Qwest in 1997, Mr. Nacchio oversaw the company during a period of revenue growth and acquisitions.

But by 2001, Qwest’s stock value had started to sink, and Qwest’s board forced Mr. Nacchio to resign in June 2002. During that period, the federal government was investigating possible accounting fraud at the company. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on Dec. 20, 2005.

    Ex-Chief at Qwest Found Guilty of Insider Trading, NYT, 20.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/technology/20qwest.html?hp

In Testimony, Gonzales Says Firings Were Justified

April 19, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, April 19 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales encountered anger and skepticism from senators today as he insisted that he had nothing to hide in the dismissals of eight United States attorneys, an episode that has cast a shadow on the Justice Department and brought calls for his resignation.

“I am here today to do my part to ensure that all facts about this matter are brought to light,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, noting that the panel’s inquiry into the dismissals had already yielded thousands of pages of internal departmental communications and hours of interviews with department officials.

“These are not the actions of someone with something to hide,” Mr. Gonzales said in his opening remarks.

But his reception from Democrats and Republicans alike signaled the extent of Mr. Gonzales’s problems. He is trying to hold on to his job amid accusations that he has been less than forthcoming, at best, about his role in the firing of the federal prosecutors, and senators from both parties pressed him on the matter today.

“Today, the Department of Justice is experiencing a crisis of leadership perhaps unrivaled during its 137-year history,” said the panel’s chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy. “The Department of Justice should never be reduced to another political arm of the White House — this White House or any White House. The Department of Justice must be worthy of its name.”

Mr. Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, made it clear that he was not persuaded by the repeated assertions from President Bush and his allies that the dismissals of the United States attorneys, who are political appointees and serve at the pleasure of the president, were above board.

“Indeed,” Mr. Leahy said, “the apparent reason for these terminations had a lot more to do with politics than performance.”

Democrats have questioned whether at least some of the eight prosecutors were fired because they were being too aggressive in investigating possible crimes linked to Republicans, or not aggressive enough in going after Democrats, or both.

“I did not do that,” the grim-faced attorney general told the senators. “I would never do that, nor do I believe that anyone else in the department advocated the removal of a U.S. attorney for such a purpose.”

But Mr. Leahy pressed Mr. Gonzales on conversations he had with Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, about removing David C. Iglesias, the United States attorney in New Mexico. “So, when was David Iglesias added to the list of U.S. attorneys to be replaced?” Mr. Leahy asked.

When Mr. Gonzales said he did not remember, although he thought Mr. Iglesias was slated for removal between Oct. 17 and Dec. 15, Mr. Leahy responded: “He was added either before or after the elections, but you don’t know when. Is that what you’re saying?”

Mr. Gonzales insisted that he did not recall the timing. So Mr. Leahy asked why Mr. Iglesias was let go, since Mr. Gonzales himself had earlier expressed confidence in him: “When and why did he lose your confidence?”

Mr. Gonzales said in reply that Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, had expressed concerns about Mr. Iglesias. “He called me and said something to the effect that Mr. Iglesias was in over his head,” Mr. Gonzales said, adding that the senator was concerned that Mr. Iglesias was not focusing enough on “public corruption cases.”

The circumstances surrounding Mr. Iglesias’s firing have aroused particular interest, since Mr. Domenici is known to have queried Mr. Iglesias about the prosecutor’s refusal to pursue a possible voter-fraud case.

Another dismissal in the spotlight is that of Carol Lam, who was the United States attorney in San Diego and who successfully prosecuted former Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican, on corruption charges. Still another high-profile dismissal was that of H. E. Cummins 3rd in Arkansas, removed to make way for J. Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Mr. Rove.

Mr. Gonzales conceded that his accounts of the firings, and his role in them, had been marked by imprecision and “misstatements.” But his expression of contrition did not seem to help him this morning.

Mr. Leahy and the panel’s ranking Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, had already recalled inconsistencies in Mr. Gonzales’s recollections in their opening remarks, especially the fact that Mr. Gonzales’s former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, testified that Mr. Gonzales was “incorrect” in his earlier declarations that he was not involved in discussions about letting the prosecutors go.

“I’d like you to win this debate,” Mr. Specter told Mr. Gonzales. “But you’re going to have to win it.”

Mr. Specter wondered aloud whether Mr. Gonzales “had been candid — more bluntly, truthful” in his earlier assertions that he was not involved in the dismissals, or at least not deeply involved. “Were you prepared for the press conference where you said there weren’t any discussions involving you?” Mr. Specter said, alluding to a March 13 news conference.

“Senator, I’ve already said that I misspoke,” Mr. Gonzales said. “It was my mistake.”

That did not satisfy Mr. Specter at all. “I don’t think you’re going to win a debate about your preparation, frankly,” he said. “Let’s get to the facts.”

It was clear that, for at least some members of the committee, there was no longer a debate about whether Mr. Gonzales should stay. “It cannot make anyone happy to have to question the credibility and competence of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and one of Mr. Gonzales’s harshest critics. “This is, however, a predicament strictly of the attorney general’s own making.”

“The circumstantial evidence is substantial and growing,” Mr. Schumer said, alluding to allegations of political interference with prosecutions, “and the burden is on the attorney general to refute it.”

The attorney general said each of the eight fired prosecutors is “a fine lawyer and dedicated professional,” and that the dismissals should have been handled more gracefully.

Mr. Gonzales got a friendly reception from Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama and a former United States attorney, who urged Mr. Gonzales to be “honest and direct” and predicted that the attorney general’s basic goodness “will show through.”

But, perhaps ominously for Mr. Gonzales, even Mr. Sessions said he thought Mr. Gonzales had been less than candid about his part in the firings, and that the entire affair had hurt the Justice Department.

“It has raised questions that I wish had not been raised, because when United States attorneys go into court, they have to appear before juries, and those juries have to believe that they’re there because of the merit of the case, and that they have personal integrity,” Mr. Sessions said.

“So this matter’s taken on a bit of life of its own, it seems,” he added. “Your ability to lead the Department of Justice is in question. I wish that weren’t not so, but I think it certainly is.”

    In Testimony, Gonzales Says Firings Were Justified, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/washington/19cnd-gonz.html?hp

Woman Sues After Falling Into Open Grave

April 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:48 a.m. ET
The New York Times

HIGHLANDS, N.C. (AP) -- An elderly woman who broke her hip when she fell into an open grave as she tried to place flowers on a friend's casket is suing the town and the funeral home.

A federal judge recently allowed Marian May's case to proceed. In court documents, she claims the site was not safe for the June 2004 service, arguing that workers neither dug the grave to the proper size nor covered the opening with plywood. She also said people weren't warned of the danger.

''It is not much fun being down there, where it's nice and black, and you are looking up and I am saying 'Jean, I don't want to go with you,''' May said of her late friend Jean Murphy Henderson.

Her husband, 92-year-old William May, claims the accident has cost him the affection of his wife. May wouldn't reveal her age but said she wasn't as old as her husband. The couple are suing for more than $75,000.

A lawyer representing Highlands said the town isn't responsible for making the grave site safe for the service. In court papers, Bryant Funeral Home also denied responsibility and said workers had warned May to stay away from the graveside.

    Woman Sues After Falling Into Open Grave, NYT, 19.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Grave-Fall.html

Full Federal Appellate Court Will Revisit Abortion Issue in South Dakota

April 11, 2007
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

A South Dakota law that would require doctors to tell women seeking abortions that the procedure would “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being” will be revisited today by the 11 judges of the federal appeals court in St. Louis.

The statute is among many abortion laws around the country requiring counseling and consent. Such laws have been upheld in the Supreme Court and in federal appeals courts, but a federal judge has blocked South Dakota’s law while she considers its constitutionality.

The appeals court hearing is a second take on an October decision by a three-judge panel of the same body, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, that the law should remain blocked because it supplements factual information with a value judgment. The full Eighth Circuit court, acting on an appeal by the state, agreed to reconsider whether to allow the law to take effect.

South Dakota’s attorney general, Larry Long, said the appeal was largely based on the one dissenting view on the three-judge panel: that the required disclosure was an obvious fact. The State Legislature, Mr. Long said, had defined “human being” to mean a member of the species homo sapiens, and that phrase does not include a value judgment.

“Human being is not a loaded phrase,” he said. “That definition everyone agreed was appropriate.”

Mimi Liu, a lawyer for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which brought the suit, said the law violated the First Amendment.

“We were surprised that the Eighth Circuit decided to rehear this case, but we believe that the law is one our side, as the panel already found,” said Ms. Liu. Planned Parenthood is the only abortion provider in South Dakota.

“What we are fighting is the imposition of a state mandated non-science-based script read by a doctor to a patient in an attempt to intimidate the patient,” said Sarah Stoesz, the chief executive for Planned Parenthood in the three-state region of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

The Legislature said the measure, which was enacted in 2005, was merely meant to fully inform women. It required that the statement about the life that would be terminated be made in writing, along with a dozen other statements, including some about the legal relationship between the mother and the fetus, and others about the increased risk of depression and suicide after abortions.

Patients would be required to sign each page of a written disclosure. Doctors would be required to certify whether they thought that the patient fully understood all the information.

The preliminary injunction blocking the law before it could take effect was issued in June 2005 by Judge Karen E. Schreier in Rapid City, S.D.

Judge Schreier wrote, “The South Dakota statute requires abortion doctors to enunciate the state’s viewpoint on an unsettled medical, philosophical, theological and scientific issue, that is, whether a fetus is a human being.”

The decision on the law’s constitutionality is still before Judge Schreier.

The full Eighth Circuit court’s decision on the injunction is not expected until late summer or early fall.

The fate of a different abortion law was decided in the November midterm elections, when a majority of voters in South Dakota rejected a broad ban on abortion.

    Full Federal Appellate Court Will Revisit Abortion Issue in South Dakota, NYT, 11.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/us/11abortion.html

Couple’s Killing in 1992 Is Focus of New Mob Trial

April 10, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

The piece of paper is, by any measure, an insignificant artifact that sheds little light on organized crime’s 100-year reign in New York: It bears a list of names and telephone numbers that prosecutors contend was scrawled by one Joseph Delmonico, an aging mob figure who investigators say retains little of the influence he once held over the Gambino crime family.

The list will nonetheless be entered into evidence in United States District Court in Brooklyn in the coming days to help prove that a young married couple from Queens embarked on one of the most ill-advised crime sprees in city history: robbing a series of mob social clubs armed with an Uzi submachine gun and what can only be described as a poor grasp of their own mortality.

Not surprisingly, the robberies ended with the 1992 slayings of the couple, Thomas and Rosemarie Uva. The killings seemed to close out an episode that caused the mob more than a little embarrassment, since such establishments had long been deemed sanctuaries where crime figures sipped coffee, played cards and schemed.

Perhaps that is why the killings, during the morning rush on Christmas Eve, had the air of a public execution. Mr. and Mrs. Uva were both shot in the head as they sat in his red 1990 four-door Mercury Topaz at a traffic light at 103rd Avenue and Woodhaven Boulevard in Ozone Park, Queens, a neighborhood where the Gambinos had long held sway.

Now the killings are the focus of a federal murder and racketeering trial set to begin today before Judge Jack B. Weinstein.

No one had been charged in the killings, long one of organized crime’s mysteries, until nearly two years ago when the F.B.I. arrested Dominick Pizzonia, 65. Prosecutors say he is a Gambino captain whose social club on Liberty Avenue was among those the couple robbed.

Mr. Pizzonia is also charged in the case with the 1988 killing of Frank Boccia, and with gambling and loansharking. A co-defendant, Alfred DiCongilio, 77, is also charged in Mr. Boccia’s slaying.

John A. Gotti, once the Gambino crime family acting boss and long the subject of federal authorities’ quiet accusations of having a role in ordering the double killing, was officially named as a co-conspirator in the case for the first time yesterday. The prosecutors, Joey Lipton and Paige Peterson, assistant United States attorneys, made the allegation in a letter to Judge Weinstein, but they did not elaborate.

No charges have been brought against Mr. Gotti in the killings, and in fact federal prosecutors in Manhattan acknowledged at his unrelated trial last year that he was unaware of the killings until they were committed. Mr. Gotti, through his lawyers, has long denied any role in the killings.

Mr. Pizzonia’s lawyer, Joseph Corozzo, has maintained his client’s innocence and has said he will defend him aggressively.

Mr. Delmonico’s list, a veritable who’s who of the Gambino family, was recovered days after the Uvas’ killings, when the police searched the couple’s Queens apartment, law enforcement officials have said. The police were told after the killings that it had been folded up inside Mr. Delmonico’s wallet, which had been taken from him in a robbery.

Court records indicate that it will be entered into evidence at the trial, along with samples of the 86-year-old Mr. Delmonico’s handwriting, and testimony by an F.B.I. handwriting expert who is expected to tell the jury that it was written by Mr. Delmonico.

To establish a motive for killing the couple, prosecutors want to show the jury that they committed the robberies. The number of robberies has varied in different accounts, as some law enforcement officials have it at about 6 and a lawyer involved in the case at as many as 10. The final tally remains uncertain, largely because none of the victims were inclined to report the robberies to the police.

Several law enforcement officials have said that in addition to at least two Gambino clubs, the couple robbed clubs belonging to the Bonanno family, with Mrs. Uva, 31, driving the getaway car and her husband, 28, wielding the Uzi.

Several Mafia turncoats are set to testify at the trial, including at least two who are expected to tell the jury about what they have described as a dispute between the Bonanno and Gambino family bosses over which family killed the Uvas and put an end to the embarrassing robberies. According to F.B.I. documents, both families eventually agreed that the Gambinos did it, specifically Mr. Pizzonia and another mob figure, Ronald Trucchio.

Much of the testimony about the killings at the trial, which is expected to last several weeks, will be second-hand accounts from Mafia turncoats who will recount what they were told.

One veteran investigator who has tracked the crime for more than a decade noted that for years, little was known about the robberies because they were discussed so little.

“It was pretty hush-hush,” the investigator said. “They didn’t want to talk about it because they were embarrassed. It was a pretty quiet thing.”

Another investigator with knowledge of the case said a story had made the rounds inside some organized crime circles that Mr. Uva, during one of the robberies, messed up the hair of an elder Gambino soldier, humiliating him in front of his confederates.

“You don’t mess with a wiseguy’s hair,” the investigator said. “That adds insult to injury.”

    Couple’s Killing in 1992 Is Focus of New Mob Trial, NYT, 10.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/nyregion/10mob.html

Bronx Man Pleads Guilty in Terror Case

April 5, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN FEUER

A jazz bassist and martial arts expert charged two years ago in an elaborate undercover terrorism investigation pleaded guilty yesterday to plotting to teach would-be Qaeda operatives how to wage jihad with hand-to-hand combat.

The man, Tarik Shah, 44, entered his guilty plea in Federal District Court in Manhattan. In exchange, he will receive a reduced maximum sentence of no more than 15 years.

The plea by Mr. Shah, who is from the Bronx, brings to a close his involvement in a wide-ranging federal sting operation that reached its height in May 2005 when an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a recruiter for Al Qaeda met him in a ground-floor apartment near the Grand Concourse. There, the government says, Mr. Shah discussed a failed attempt to attend a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and then, in words that were secretly recorded, pledged “bayat,” or allegiance, to Al Qaeda.

The government has acknowledged that neither Mr. Shah, nor the three others accused in the case — two of whom have already pleaded guilty — were on the verge of any violent act. But the case stood out because it stemmed, in some measure, from the work of a former jailhouse informer and evolved into a large sting operation, complete with secret meetings, coded messages and talk of travel overseas for formal training in the name of jihad.

Mr. Shah first came to the attention of authorities in 2003, court papers show, when he began a relationship with a man he did not know was a federal informer. He told the man of his martial arts training and of his ability to teach “brothers” how to fight.

The government never revealed the identity of the informer beyond saying he was convicted in 1990 of crimes related to a robbery; his cooperation in terrorism investigations began while he was behind bars.

Mr. Shah’s conversations with the informer drew the interest of investigators, which intensified in December 2003 when he was arrested in Yonkers on charges unrelated to terror. The police discovered in checking his car phone the numbers of two men whom the F.B.I. had already identified as suspects in terrorism investigations.

Shortly after that search, Mr. Shah met again with the informer, who told him of a warehouse on Long Island that Mr. Shah could use for his martial arts training. Mr. Shah, the government says, was intrigued and offered the informer details of his own secret militant ambitions, claiming that his life as a jazz musician was his “greatest cover.”

Even while imprisoned and awaiting trial, Mr. Shah, who grew up listening to Cannonball Adderley records, continued to practice his music. He and his brother, Antoine Dowdell, a jazz pianist, would sometimes sing and scat in an isolated visiting area of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.

In early 2004, the informer, at the F.B.I.’s direction, told Mr. Shah that he had been in touch with a terrorism recruiter from the Middle East who had been looking for someone to train fighters in close-quarters combat. In March 2004, Mr. Shah and the informer took an Amtrak train from Pennsylvania Station to Plattsburgh, N.Y., court papers say, to meet with the recruiter, who was actually an F.B.I. agent.

Mr. Shah told the undercover agent of a friend, Rafiq Sabir, an emergency room doctor with a Columbia University medical degree, who had worked in New York and Florida. The agent told Mr. Shah that the doctor’s skills could be used for jihadists who are hurt in training.

Dr. Sabir is awaiting trial in the case. Abdulrahman Farhane, a Brooklyn bookseller, has pleaded guilty to plotting to buy arms for Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. And on Monday, Mahmud Faruq Brent, a paramedic from Washington, entered a guilty plea to having attended a training camp run by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2002.

During the many months of the investigation, Mr. Shah had conversations about Osama bin Laden, according to the government, and about Mr. Shah’s interest in learning about chemicals and explosives.

“This has always been one of my dreams,” he said at one point about his proposed role as a martial arts trainer, according to a federal complaint.

Dr. Sabir, the government says, attended the meeting with Mr. Shah and the undercover agent two years ago in the Bronx. At the outset of the meeting, the government says, Mr. Shah took care to assure everyone that the apartment was “safe.”

    Bronx Man Pleads Guilty in Terror Case, NYT, 5.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/05/nyregion/05terror.html

Crime Intensifies Debate Over Taping of Suspects

April 2, 2007
By ERIC LIPTON and JENNIFER STEINHAUER
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, March 31 — The account, buried in a mountain of documents assembled for a Congressional investigation, describes a decidedly local yet brutal crime: a Navajo man charged with beating his girlfriend nearly to death and then hanging her by a rope outside their Arizona trailer home to make the attack look like a suicide attempt.

The crime has none of the political intrigue of the other cases, mainly dealing with government corruption or voter fraud, before lawmakers as they examine the circumstances surrounding the dismissals of eight United States attorneys.

But the Arizona case has reached all the way from the Navajo reservation to the halls of Congress, part of a still-stewing dispute within the Justice Department over a critical law enforcement question: Should interviews with criminal suspects be tape-recorded?

Paul K. Charlton, the United States attorney in Arizona, was ousted after spending months protesting a Federal Bureau of Investigation policy that, for practical purposes, forbids the taping of almost all confessions, in stark contrast to the practice of many local law enforcement agencies in Arizona and other locations across the country.

Mr. Charlton blamed the F.B.I. policy for the resulting plea bargain in the Navajo reservation assault case, as well as the acquittal of a defendant in a child sexual abuse case and a suspect in a prison murder indictment.

Eight states, by law or court action, mandate taping of interviews with suspects in at least serious felony cases, turning a tape recorder or video camera into an important tool in convictions, like DNA tests, fingerprints and ballistics. More than 450 law enforcement agencies in major cities and smaller jurisdictions also require the taping of certain interrogations.

The F.B.I., a division of the Justice Department, has strenuously resisted the practice unless special permission is granted by supervisors, under the theory that it may discourage suspects from talking and expose juries to interrogation methods that the department would rather not highlight.

But the inability to tape suspects, especially those accused of sexual abuse and domestic violence, can seriously compromise a case, Mr. Charlton and other prosecutors said.

Mr. Charlton said the problem was particularly acute in Arizona, a state with 21 Indian reservations, where federal law enforcement officials handle major felony cases. In essence, he said, differing investigative practices have resulted in two distinct criminal justice systems. If a crime occurred off the reservation, the confession would be taped, but if it happened on tribal land, it would not.

“That disparity in justice is unacceptable,” Mr. Charlton said in an interview.

The F.B.I., in documents defending its policy, argued that taping was not always possible, particularly when agents were on the road, and that it was not always appropriate. Psychological tricks like misleading or lying to a suspect in questioning or pretending to show the suspect sympathy might also offend a jury, the agency said.

“Perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to lay persons as proper means of obtaining information from defendants,” said one of the once-secret internal Justice Department communications made public as part of the investigation into the dismissals of the United States attorneys.

The debate in Arizona began in early 2006, when Mr. Charlton sent a memorandum to all federal law enforcement agencies in the state notifying them that, as of March 2006, any cases directed to his office for prosecution in which a statement from an investigative target has been taken must, with few exceptions, be recorded.

“A defendant’s admission regarding his own criminal conduct is often the most single powerful piece of evidence in a case,” he wrote, in explaining the new policy. The F.B.I. agent in charge in Arizona offered some flexibility, approving the uniform taping of interviews with child victims of sexual crimes. But the agency made clear that mandatory taping of all suspects’ statements was a nonstarter.

A policy dispute turned into a major tug of war.

Two days before the policy went into effect, Mr. Charlton said, he was pulled aside by an official from the deputy attorney general’s office while attending a Justice Department conference.

“The F.B.I. is furious,” he said he was told. “You have to pull this program back.”

Mr. Charlton, convinced that the dichotomy in the system was unfair to victims and suspects on Indian reservations, refused, and threatened to resign. As a compromise, Justice Department officials asked Mr. Charlton to submit a plan to test the policy, which would be adopted only after the F.B.I. and other federal law enforcement players would be given a chance to weigh in. Mr. Charlton cited the Navajo beating case in his March 2006 petition for the approval of the pilot project. The defendant in that case, Jimmie Neztsosie, had been charged in 2005 with assault with intent to commit murder for the attack on his live-in girlfriend.

After the victim refused to cooperate, and investigators determined that she had once before tried to commit suicide, Mr. Neztsosie’s two-and-a-half hour confession became the most critical piece of evidence. But that confession had been turned into a two-page written statement, which did not indicate if Mr. Neztsosie was intoxicated during the interview and if he had been questioned in English or in Navajo.

“An audio and/or video recording of the statement would allow the jury to hear from the defendant’s own mouth what he did,” the prosecutor who handled the case wrote, explaining why the office decided to agree to a plea bargain. “The jury would be able to hear and see that the agents did not put words in the defendant’s mouth, that the defendant understood English and that he was not intoxicated.”

The failure to tape suspect interviews has been blamed for several high-profile setbacks for federal and state prosecutors, including the failure to impose the death penalty against Terry L. Nichols, in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Instead, Mr. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison after the jury foreman questioned why his statement to investigators had not been recorded.

“Having the offender speaking and saying, ‘Yes, I did it,’ helps,” said David LaBahn, executive director of the District Attorneys Association in California, where mandatory taping statewide has been under consideration.

But officials at the F.B.I. remain unconvinced.

They disputed Mr. Charlton’s claim that he lost cases, or was forced to offer plea bargains, because of the failure to tape convictions. Officials also questioned the cost of a broad recording and transcription effort and the likelihood that defendants might decline to offer statements if they knew they were being recorded.

“We interview thousands upon thousands of people every day of the year,” said the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, explaining his objection to Mr. Charlton’s plan during a Senate hearing last week. “And some of them may end up as defendants, some may not. And it’s not a question of just recording the interviews, but also who is going to — if they’re recorded, who is going to transcribe them?”

Mr. Charlton said the most disconcerting argument to him — and apparently at least one official at the Justice Department — was the bureau’s worry that its interrogation techniques might offend juries. “So we want to hide the truth?” wrote one unnamed Justice Department official in a handwritten note, scribbled alongside the FB.I.’s defense of its policy. “Don’t want the jury to reach its own judgment?”

The Justice Department review of Mr. Charlton’s taping proposal continued for months, even as department officials in Washington assembled a list of United States attorneys who would be dismissed.

Mr. Charlton’s name was not on the early versions of this list. It showed up only in September, as the review of the taping policy drew to a close. Around the same time, Mr. Charlton had a conflict with Justice Department officials over a homicide that he did not believe should be prosecuted as a death penalty case.

Mr. Charlton was removed before officials in Washington gave him a final verdict on his proposal. After his dismissal they cited his adamancy about the taping and his position on the death penalty case as two major reasons for his dismissal.

“In light of Paul C.’s departure, should this initiative still go forward?” said a memorandum written by Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty in January, referring to Mr. Charlton. The memorandum was included in the materials turned over to Congress.

The answer, as least so far, has not been forthcoming from the Department of Justice.

Eric Lipton reported from Washington, and Jennifer Steinhauer from Phoenix.

    Crime Intensifies Debate Over Taping of Suspects, NYT, 2.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/washington/02taping.html