Unpersons and the Appellate Courts
January 12th, 2008 by Sonny
US Appellate Court, DC circuit holds that innocent people held as prisoners and tortured in US custody are essentialy a sort of judicial unperson.
The detainees allege that they were held in stress positions, interrogated for sessions lasting 24 hours, intimidated with dogs and isolated in darkness and that their beards were shaved.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the detainees captured in Afghanistan aren’t recognized as “persons” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because they were aliens held outside the United States. The Religious Freedom Act prohibits the government from “substantially burdening a person’s religion.”
The court rejected other claims on the grounds that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had certified that the military officials were acting within the scope of their jobs when they authorized the tactics, and that such tactics were “foreseeable.”
“It was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably `seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants,” Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in the court’s main opinion.
Judge Janice Rogers Brown dissented with parts of the opinion, saying that “it leaves us with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantanamo are not `person(s).’
This is the saddest and most damaging legacy of the Bush administration.
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