Lynne Stewart Trial:Michael Tigar's Closing
Michael Tigar has finished his two day closing argument in the Lynne Stewart trial. The prosecution began its rebuttal closing Tuesday and the jury should get the case Wednesday:
Michael Tigar, finished his closing argument on behalf of civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart by saying he feared Islamic or other fundamentalists were going to win -- but not through usual means. He said the authors of the Bill of Rights were "not cowards," and he portrayed his client as a hero for more than 30 years of work on behalf of people who were often destitute or despised.
"Suppose we got so worked up, so incited by the rhetoric of government, that we decided to punish people for their radical politics because their politics scared us or their religious doctrine appalled us," he said.
Tigar said such an attitude might cause people to "skip over reasonable doubt and do things based on suspicion," casting aside the presumption of innocence. "If all that happened, members of the jury, the fundamentalists would have won," he added. "They would have seen extinguished the light of this last hope of earth, which is not some particular country, but it is the very ideology of human rights." He said such a result would be cheered by Islamic fundamentalists.
What's really at stake in the Lynne Stewart case? Your constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel. Your right to zealous representation by the counsel of your choice. Your right to speak to your attorney in confidence, without the Government listening in.
The case also is important because of the threat it represents to the attorney-client privilege and attorney-client relationship. It is being watched closely by defense lawyers around the country because it will be a litmus test of the extent to which the Government will go in hampering efforts of defense lawyers who represent accused terrorists. That's today. Tomorrow the Government might to decide to hamper our defense of you.
This isn't about the Left or some holdover '60's radical. It's about you and me and the American system of justice and respect for our Constitution. For more on the Stewart case, read civil liberties expert Elaine Cassel .
If you are not familiar with the case, it's about New York criminal defense attorney Lynne Stewart, who represented an imprisoned jailed sheikh who had been found guilty in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. In a nutshell, there was a gag order imposed by the Bureau of Prisons. She may have violated it when she held a press conference at which she announced her client was calling for the end of a ceasefire between his Islamic fundamentalist faction and the Egyptian Government. As a result of her statement about the Sheik calling for the end to the ceasefire, she was charged with aiding a terrorist organization.
Much of the evidence against her comes from taped conversations she had with her client at the jail.
More than 85,000 audio recordings of voice calls, faxes and computer transmissions were made by the government during its seven-year investigation as it worked to build a case that Stewart and the three men were conduits for the sheikh to his terrorist followers, and helped him, among other things, to communicate to them his desire for a resumption of terror attacks.
That kind of taping is more likely to happen now, since Ashcroft, in May, 2002, issued these guidelines to allow attorney-client monitoring of conversations.
Some of our prior posts on the case are here and here. More case details and news analysis are here and here.
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