The Supremesa district court has issued a new
ruling in the Hamdan case. LizardBreath blogs it
here. As she reads it, it is a good news/bad news case. Good news:
RobertsRobertson, the district court judge, agrees that the military commissions act cannot deny habeas rights to anyone who has them under the constitution because there is neither invasion nor rebellion going on right now. Bad news: Roberts
on doesn't think Hamdan had habeas rights to begin with. You can't deny habeas rights to citizens, no matter where they are, and you can't deny anyone habeas rights if they are on US soil, but you can deny non-citizens habeas rights overseas. The discussion at Unfogged includes much back linking to Obsidian Wings, where CharleyCarp is putting up the argument that this goes against the habeas rights in English common law.
This remark about the English laws that formed the basis of modern habeas rights gets featured
More to the policy end of things, one of the main reasons for the 1679 act was the crown's policy of intentionally placing prisoners beyond the reach of the writ, so that it would not have to justify its conduct in a court of law. This was tyranny then, and it's tyranny now: there is (imo) and should be no place on earth where the American Executive is free of the constraints of the legal document that created it.
2 comments:
This is a district court ruling, and the ruling is written by one Judge Robertson not one Chief Justice Roberts.
oops, fixed.
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