WASHINGTON — The mixed verdict in the case of the first Guantanamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court on Wednesday quickly re-ignited a fierce debate over the Obama administration’s effort to restore the role of the traditional criminal justice system in handling terrorism prosecutions.
will face between 20 years and life in prison as a result of his conviction on one charge related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. But because a jury acquitted him on more than 280 other charges — including every count of murder — critics of the Obama administration’s strategy on detainees said the verdict proved that civilian courts could not be trusted to handle the prosecution of terrorists.
“This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantanamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in at Guantanamo.”
Adding political force of such criticism, Mr. King is set to become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee in January, and he promised to use oversight hearings to pressure the administration over its handling of terrorism trials.
Several other soon-to-be-powerful Republican lawmakers — including of Texas, who will be chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in the new Congress — made similar statements denouncing the use of civilian courts to prosecute terrorism cases.
But administration officials said the verdict was a victory, not a disaster, for the government. Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, stressed that despite the challenges of the case — including the judge’s ruling that much of the evidence in the case was inadmissible because of Mr. Ghailani’s treatment during the Bush administration — the end result was a conviction and a lengthy prison sentence.
“People who are criticizing this verdict need to remember the underlying facts of this case and the fact that the verdict handed down will lead to a sentence of anywhere from 20 years to life,” Mr. Miller said.
Mason Clutter, the counsel of the Rule of Law Program at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan nonprofit group that supports civilian trials for Guantánamo detainees, said that most of the usual problems that proponents of military tribunals argue are posed by civilian trials — like extremely costly security, public grandstanding by the defendant, and disclosure of classified information — did not happen in the Ghailani case.
“The system worked here,” she said. “I don’t think we judge success based on the number of convictions that were received. I think we judge success based on fair prosecutions consistent with the Constitution and the rule of law.”
, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said late Wednesday that his office would seek a life sentence for Mr. Ghailani.
The jury did not explain its verdict, which seemed contradictory: it convicted Mr. Ghailani of conspiring to blow up the buildings, but acquitted him of conspiring to murder the people inside the buildings. Some legal observers speculated that it might have been a brokered deal among the jury, after signs this week that one of the 12 members had been holding out for a different result than the other 11.
Moreover, many observers attributed any weakness to the prosecution’s case to the fact that the judge who presided over the trial, Judge of Federal District Court in Manhattan refused to allow prosecutors to introduce testimony from an important witness apparently because investigators discovered the man’s existence after interrogators used abusive and coercive techniques on Mr. Ghailani.
Much of the criticism of the verdict was premised on the idea that such evidence would have been admissible in a commission trial. Mr. Smith, for example, pointed to the exclusion of that evidence as undercutting the idea that foreign terrorists “can be adequately tried in civilian courts.”
“The judge in this case, applying constitutional and legal standards to which all U.S. citizens are entitled, threw out important evidence,” he said. “The result is that the jury acquitted on all but one conspiracy count.”
But proponents of civilian trials contended that such criticism was based on a faulty premise. In his order rejecting the witness, Judge Kaplan strongly suggested in a footnote that a military commission judge would have excluded that testimony, too, pointing to restrictions against the use of evidence obtained by torture in military trials.
Still, arguments over the factual details of the case were overshadowed by the political dynamics of the verdict.
The case had been closely watched by both proponents and critics of Attorney General ’s decision in November 2009 to prosecute and four other accused conspirators in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in a federal courthouse in Manhattan.
src: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/nyregion/19detainees.html?nl=nyregion&emc=ura1
