AP: N.Y. prosecutors want lawyer punished (Lynne Stewart)

Posted on Tue, Sep. 05, 2006

N.Y. prosecutors want lawyer punished
LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press

NEW YORK - Prosecutors seeking a 30-year prison term for a lawyer convicted
of aiding terrorists have called her behavior "flagrant abuse of her profession"
ahead of next month's sentencing hearing.

Lynne Stewart was convicted in February 2005 of providing material support
to terrorists by releasing a statement by her client, Sheik Ahmed Abdel-Rahman,
who was imprisoned after being convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up New York
City landmarks.

Stewart's "egregious, flagrant abuse of her profession, abuse that amounted
to material support to a terrorist group, deserves to be severely punished,"
prosecutors wrote in a document submitted Thursday to a judge.

Her lawyers have argued that Stewart should receive no prison time, arguing that a
harsh sentence would frighten other lawyers from representing notorious clients and
that Stewart's three decades of distinguished work for indigent clients should speak
louder than a single serious mistake.

-snip-

MICHAEL TIGAR: He is a Staten Island postal worker. He had many, many conversations in Arabic with people in Egypt. In Mr. Sattar’s defense, it should be pointed out that we said, “Well what country was the kidnapping going to take place in?” The judge said that we don't have to tell them. “Well who was going to get murdered?” “You don't have to tell them.” So this is an unknown possible kidnapping in a possible foreign country done by weapons that were never produced in court. “There are weapons of destruction in Egypt,” said the Bush administration, but it never produced any. It’s getting to be a pattern. He was convicted of that. Then Sattar was convicted of his telephone solicitations with calls back and forth to Egypt and Afghanistan of crimes of violence. Lynne was convicted of conspiring to prepare to assist Sattar’s conspiracy and with actually preparing to assist Sattar's conspiracy. The judge rejected the idea that so-called multiple inchoate crimes does pose some danger to freedom of expression as well as being unheard of in American law. And once again Lynne's alleged participation in that consisted of this one and only one statement. I need to correct something. Terrorism is not an element of any of the offenses with which Lynne Stewart was charged. The terror label appears in the catch line of one of the statutes. It is not an element. And, yet, you can see how successful the Bush administration has been at pasting the terrorism label on these non-events so closely, so clearly that everybody kind of assumes it, and it becomes a part of discourse which is, of course, the difficulty in a trial like this. As Lynne said in one of your video clips, “If you mention Osama bin Laden's name, you don't have to present any evidence. You can tell the jury that he has nothing to do with the case, but there's been this discourse, this drumbeat that makes it very difficult for our voice to be heard.”

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