Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Activist lawyers fear 'chilling effect' from verdict (Lynne Stewart's conviction)
Newsday ^ | Feb. 11, 2005 | ANTHONY M. DESTEFANO

Posted on 02/11/2005 2:03:53 AM PST by FairOpinion

In the wake of activist lawyer Lynne Stewart's conviction yesterday, several defense attorneys said fear of prosecution could now hamper zealous defense of unpopular clients, including suspected terrorists.

Others agreed with prosecutors that Stewart crossed a line that made her situation complex.

Activist attorney and radio talk show personality Ron Kuby, who once represented Stewart's client Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, said the verdict will intimidate attorneys handling unpopular political clients.

"It makes it that much more easier for the government to intimidate activist lawyers," Kuby said. "The threat of 20 years incarceration is a terrible deterrent against zealous advocacy."

(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; News/Current Events; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: abdelrahman; lynnestewart; sheikh; terrorists
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041-60 next last
Good! The message is: Do NOT conspire with the terrorists. Very simple.

She was NOT convicted for defending the terrorist Sheik as a client, she was convicted for conspiring with and aiding terrorists, by ILLEGALLY carrying messages between the terrorists.

1 posted on 02/11/2005 2:03:54 AM PST by FairOpinion
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion
Exactly. Will Lefties get the message? You should always put allegiance to your country first ahead of a particular cause. No matter what it might be.

Denny Crane: "There are two places to find the truth. First God and then Fox News."

2 posted on 02/11/2005 2:06:44 AM PST by goldstategop (In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion

I hope Kuby and all those scumbags are nervous now. Maybe they'll start seriously considering who and what they support in the future (kinda doubt it, though.)


3 posted on 02/11/2005 2:17:10 AM PST by SirLurkedalot (I'm back...with NEW and IMPROVED knuckle-dragging action.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion

And in other news, it is feared that the conviction of rapists is having a chilling effect on people having sex.

These people have no moral compass.


4 posted on 02/11/2005 2:19:10 AM PST by SampleMan ("Yes I am drunk, very drunk. But you madam are ugly, and tomorrow morning I shall be sober." WSC)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion
Others agreed with prosecutors that Stewart crossed a line that made her situation complex.

Only a lawyer would say that.

It made her situation simple: Criminal.

5 posted on 02/11/2005 2:25:27 AM PST by bill1952 ("All that we do is done with an eye towards something else.")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: goldstategop

"Will Lefties get the message?"

No.


6 posted on 02/11/2005 2:30:08 AM PST by kb2614 ( You have everything to fear, including fear itself. - The new DNC slogan)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion

They should put some ice on it


7 posted on 02/11/2005 2:30:36 AM PST by eclectic (Liberalism is a mental disorder)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion
The last couple lines in the story describe the message she carried as "political"; they neglect to say that the political message included instructions to his followers to murder people.
8 posted on 02/11/2005 2:34:54 AM PST by mark502inf
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: mark502inf

I also saw it mentioned on TV, that she allowed some disciple of the Sheik to come with her and talk with him in Arabic -- i.e. allow the Sheik to give instruction to a terrorist in his organization -- , while she was saying nonsense stuff in English to make the guard think she was talking with her client.

This is conspiring with the terrorists.


9 posted on 02/11/2005 2:42:22 AM PST by FairOpinion
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion
"Sure hope someone keeps an eye out for her in prison!"
10 posted on 02/11/2005 2:48:32 AM PST by Solamente
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: KylaStarr; Cindy; StillProud2BeFree; nw_arizona_granny; Revel; Velveeta; Dolphy; ...

ping


11 posted on 02/11/2005 2:48:40 AM PST by Calpernia (Breederville.com)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Calpernia

Smiling...

No "chilling effect" on this end.


12 posted on 02/11/2005 2:57:35 AM PST by Cindy
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion
I'm stuned!

I guess you have to be stupid and unable to draw distinctions to be an "activist lawyer". Average people of average intelligence can discern between legal advocacy and conspiracy.

Just as members of the MSM think that their press card gives them not only the license but the duty to force the facts to comply with their prejudices, so this clown thinks that having passed the bar gives her the right to do anything whatsoever to defend her client.

What a hugh maroon! I'm series!

13 posted on 02/11/2005 2:59:33 AM PST by Mad Dawg (My P226 wants to teach you what SIGnify means ...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Cindy

Can't help but wonder what is in Ramsey Clark's mind right about now. Think I will report that information.


14 posted on 02/11/2005 3:00:20 AM PST by Calpernia (Breederville.com)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 12 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion

Ron Kuby, on his best day, is a dim bulb.

It is long past time that lawyers are held accountable for the crap they pull under the "attorney-client" privacy umbrella.

Stewart's conviction is what justice is supposed to be about.


15 posted on 02/11/2005 3:00:48 AM PST by DustyMoment (Repeal CFR NOW!!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3340

Who Is Behind Lynne Stewart?
By Michael Tremoglie
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 25, 2002

Lynne Stewart is the radical attorney who has been indicted by Attorney General John Ashcroft for enabling her client, the terrorist Sheik, Omar Abdul Rahman, to carry out his murderous agendas while in prison by helping him to communicate with his terrorist organization in Egypt. Rahman was the spiritual leader of a cell that carried out the first World Trade Center bombing and was planning to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. Stewart was recruited to the Rahman case by Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, who has a long history of anti-American causes dating back to the Vietnam War.

Ramsey Clark is the founder of the International Action Committee (IAC), a pro-Saddam, pro-Milosevic organization that regards America as the world's leading and most threatening terrorist state. In a previous article about the "peace" organization A.N.S.W.E.R (March 29, 2002), I noted IAC's interlinking directorate with the Workers World Party (WWP), a Stalinist organization which was created in 1959 as a splinter of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. In that year, WWP leader Sam Marcy and his comrades supported the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution which had sought unsuccessfully to break free from the Soviet empire. WWP cadres staff the IAC offices and share political platforms. For example, WWP leaders spoke at an IAC rally in 1995 condemning Republicans generally and The Contract with America, specifically. Among them was Gavrielle Gemma, who has been credited with recruiting Clark to the IAC.

Among its icons, like Cuba's dictator Fidel Castro, the Workers World Party has an unrestrained admiration for North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung. In November 1986, Deirdre Griswold, an IAC executive, declared that North Korea was a socialist success story because there was no poverty, famine, or homelessness in North Korea. Griswold alleged that Kim Il Sung's birthday was celebrated both in North and South Korea.

The National Co-Director of the IAC is Brian Becker, who is a member of the secretariat of the WWP, and a member of the A.N.S.W.E.R coalition steering committee. A.N.S.W.E.R. is presently coordinating anti-American, pro-Iraq "peace" protests across the country. Becker is much admired by the Korean Communists for his loyalty to the terrorist state. In its March 16, 2002 edition, the Korean Central News of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea reported that , "Brian Becker, member of the secretariat of the Workers World Party of the United States, at a press interview held in Pyongyang before his departure from the DPRK, denounced the U.S. for having committed crimes against the Korean people. He said that his visit to the Sinchon Museum during his stay in the DPRK offered a good opportunity to know well about the thrice-cursed mass killings of peaceable people committed by the U.S. during the Korean War. The United States which is chiefly responsible for the division of Korea keeps almost 40,000 troops in South Korea, staging various war maneuvers and mercilessly killing innocent people, he noted. He demanded the U.S. troops be withdrawn from South Korea at once, taking their lethal weapons with them. He stressed that the Workers World Party of the United States would in the future, too, conduct a more vigorous solidarity campaign condemning the U.S. administration's moves to perpetuate the division of Korea and calling for the withdrawal of the U.S. troops from South Korea."

As well as being a moving force in the WWP, IAC and A.N.S.W.E.R., Becker is chairman of the U.S. Troops Out of Korea Committee and vice chairman of the International Committee of the same. He helped coordinate the protests at the inaugural of President Bush and in general seems to be involved in every anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic effort mounted by the political left.

Becker and the IAC are also staunch defenders of Slobodan Miloslevic, Kim II Sung and Kim Sung II and Mumia Abu-Jamal. On June 23, 2001 Becker directed a "people's tribunal" condemning US war crimes in Korea. One of the sponsors of the tribunal was Al-Awda, The Palestine Right of Return Commission. Clark and IAC members periodically meet with North Korean, Iraqi and Cuban government officials. Among other charges the group has made, the IAC has claimed that Usama bin Laden is the victim of an American imperialist plot. They contend that the military-oil complex is exploiting 9/11 to take control of the oil resources of the Middle East — a claim echoed by the Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel and other factions of the left.

The Workers World Party is an anti-semitic, Stalinist organization, whose goal is a communist revolution which would overthrow the American "ruling class" and establish a "workers state."The founder of the WWP, Sam Marcy, was a Communist who believed that Soviet leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were counter-revolutionaries. Marcy allied the WWP with the Russian Communist Workers Party (RKRP) an anti-Semitic group that criticized Vladimir Putin for being too close to the Jews. The WWP decried perestroika — Gorbachev's attempt to reform Communism — and associated itself with Iraq after the USSR severed its contact with Hussein. They considered Saddam Hussein a victim of U.S. imperialism.

The FBI considers the WWP a terrorist organization. On May 10, 2001, FBI Director Louis Freeh stated that "Anarchists and extremist socialist groups — many of which, such as the Workers World Party, have an international presence and, at times, also represent a potential threat in the United States."

The mainstream media has somehow missed the fact that the most ubiquitous organizer of "anti-war" protests is directed by a terrorist support group. It would seem that a question on this front to Ramsey Clark at one of his regular press conferences might be in order.

Clark's published views are interesting enough. In a December 1997 interview with "Impact International," Clark claimed that when the Cold War against the Communists ended, America decided to make Islam its new enemy. has resulted in American hostility towards Islam. According to Clark, "Islam would be the new enemy. At Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's trial, what we saw in both FBI and CIA files, and this is their phrase, 'the greatest threat to the international and domestic security of the United States is Islamic fundamentalism.' But actually, 'Islamic fundamentalism' to them is redundant. So they have to convict a blind Islamic scholar of terrorism to show that Islam is, at it highest levels of learning and attainment, nothing but a terrorist concept. How could a blind man be a terrorist, what could he do? They claimed that he was the leader of the conspiracy that set off the bomb in the World Trade Centre. They have now had two trials and two convictions of the defendants in the World Trade Centre cases, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's name wasn't even mentioned at either trial. He had nothing to do with it, but we have this war against Islam going on."

It was Ramsey Clark who urged Lynne Stewart to become the blind sheik's defense attorney. Clark's two previous choices, Center for Constitutional Rights attorneys and noted defenders of criminals and terrorists — including the Palestinian assassin of Meyer Kahane — William Kuntsler and Ron Kuby, had recused themselves. Stewart is also well known for her representation of "revolutionaries" and murderers. Most recently, she represented several cop-killers (whom she no doubt considered revolutionaries) and Sammy "the Bull," Gravano a Mafioso whom she no doubt considered just rebellious).

Stewart shares the Communist beliefs of the WWP and IAC and the Center for Constitutional Rights. She is anti-capitalist and believes the USA is an imperialistic nation, and that anti-capitalist violence is justified. In a 1995 New York Times interview she said, "I don't believe in anarchistic violence, but in directed violence. That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, and sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support." Obviously, Stewart's worldview meshes seamlessly with that of Saddam Hussein, Yassir Arafat, the blind sheik and Osama Bin Laden. And with that of Deirdre Griswold Brian, Becker, Ramsey Clark and the Workers World Party.

Stewart and Clark's legal defense of the blind Seik resulted in a conviction. They placed America on trial as a repressive, imperialist and terrorist state, and portrayed the Sheik as nothing more than an innocent holy man and political activist. It did not work.

Now Stewart's lawyer, Michael Tigar, is attempting the same legal strategy for her. This strategy has been formula of the anti-American legal left since the 1960s when Charles Garry, himself a member of the Communist Party, first devised it in the defense of Black Panther leader Huey Newton who was accused of murdering a California Highway Patrol Officer named John Frey. Garry put the United States on trial for racism, in a effort to distract the jury from the facts in the case (Newton was observed shooting the officer by a black bus driver who was only ten feet away.) The indict America defense was then developed by William Kuntsler and his disciples at the Center for Cosntitutional Rights, including Ron Kuby who represented Kahane's Arab assassin. Johnnie Cochran made the strategy world famous in his defense of O.J. Simpson. This was not merely coincidence, since Cochran began his criminal law career as a Black Panther attorney, defending Geronimo Pratt in the early 1970s. Lynne Stewart's counsel Michael Tigar was active in Communist Party groups while a student at Berkeley in the 1960s. One of Tigar's many accomplishments was to organize a U.S. delegation to the World Communist Youth Festival. Another was to defend Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols.

There are many legitimate defense attorneys who provide legal defenses for clients with whom they do not themselves sympathize. Lynne Stewart, Ramsey Clark, Ron Kuby and Michael Tigar are not among them.


16 posted on 02/11/2005 3:00:52 AM PST by Calpernia (Breederville.com)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: SirLurkedalot

My dog don't bite.
That is not my dog.
I don't own a dog.
Situation more complex?

Carry their water, go to jail, dog or no dog.


17 posted on 02/11/2005 3:01:26 AM PST by cleo1939
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: g.i.joe

ping


18 posted on 02/11/2005 3:02:34 AM PST by Calpernia (Breederville.com)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 16 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion

The Lefty's will never get it. Twenty years is not enough for treason.


19 posted on 02/11/2005 3:03:52 AM PST by gakrak ("A wise man's heart is his right hand, But a fool's heart is at his left" Eccl 10:2)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: FairOpinion
"It makes it that much more easier for the government to intimidate activist lawyers," Kuby said. "The threat of 20 years incarceration is a terrible deterrent against zealous advocacy."

Kuby, who, along with the late William Kunstler, has represented his share of political clients, said he would continue to help unpopular litigants. But he said other lawyers, faced with criticism from the media, their families and other attorneys, might choose not to push a client's cause vociferously.

"It reflects the tenor of the times," said Jonathan Marks, who is representing Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad in a terrorism-related case in federal court in Brooklyn.

Marks said the Stewart verdict illustrates the tremendous prejudice faced by people linked to Islamic fundamentalism.
-Newsday

Mr. Kuby it is not a deterrent to zealous advocacy, it is a deterent to zealotry. As for you, Mr. Marks, I think the correct term you are looking for is not Islamic fundamentals. You need to call it by it's proper name is
Islamofacism.

The crocodile tears you cry about the chilling of the efficacy of counsel for POS you defend. Do not resonate with citizens, because of the appearance of most attorneys to be as delusional as their clients or alternately just being in it for the money. Most of us in Jesusland realize these pieces of human refuse are deserving of counsel, but really get PO'd at the cheerleader tactics you employ. When we get upset with you it is normally because we choose country over treason every time. It is our own fault we did not prosecute you when you were hippies. Then the phrase "Our Country love it or leave it.", would have made you left wing socialist types go to your spiritual homeland of the people's republic of China or the USSR where you could be free according to your values system.

Condensed version: We are very happy that Ms. Stewart will be possibly spending her dying day in prison. We would be happy if you did too.
20 posted on 02/11/2005 3:05:15 AM PST by MKM1960
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041-60 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson