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Pentagon chief loses bid to reject 9/11 plea deals
Legal World News |
2025/01/01 19:59
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A military appeals court has ruled against Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s effort to throw out the plea deals reached for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants in the 9/11 attacks, a U.S. official said.
The decision puts back on track the agreements that would have the three men plead guilty to one of the deadliest attacks on the United States in exchange for being spared the possibility of the death penalty. The attacks by al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and helped spur U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called its war on terror.
The military appeals court released its ruling Monday night, according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Military prosecutors and defense attorneys for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached the plea agreements after two years of government-approved negotiations. The deals were announced late last summer.
Supporters of the plea agreements see them as a way of resolving the legally troubled case against the men at the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Pretrial hearings for Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi have been underway for more than a decade.
Much of the focus of pretrial arguments has been on how torture of the men while in CIA custody in the first years after their detention may taint the overall evidence in the case.
Within days of news of the plea deal this summer, Austin issued a brief order saying he was nullifying them.
He cited the gravity of the 9/11 attacks in saying that as defense secretary, he should decide on any plea agreements that would spare the defendants the possibility of execution.
Defense lawyers said Austin had no legal authority to reject a decision already approved by the Guantanamo court’s top authority and said the move amounted to unlawful interference in the case.
The military judge hearing the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, had agreed that Austin lacked standing to throw out the plea bargains after they were underway. That had set up the Defense Department’s appeal to the military appeals court.
Austin now has the option of taking his effort to throw out the plea deals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Separately, the Pentagon said it had repatriated one of the longest-held detainees at the Guantanamo military prison, a Tunisian man who U.S. authorities approved for transfer more than a decade ago.
Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi’s return to Tunisia leaves 26 men at Guantanamo. That’s down from a peak population of about 700 Muslim men detained abroad and brought to the prison in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Al-Yazidi’s repatriation leaves 14 men awaiting transfer to other countries after U.S. authorities waived any prosecution and cleared them as security risks.
The Biden administration, pressed by rights groups to free remaining Guantanamo detainees held without charge, transferred out three other men this month. The U.S. says it is searching for suitable and stable countries willing to receive the remaining 14.
In a statement, the U.S. military said it had worked with authorities in Tunisia for the “responsible transfer” of al-Yazidi. He had been a prisoner at Guantanamo since 2002, when the U.S. began sending Muslim detainees taken abroad there.
Al-Yazidi is the last of a dozen Tunisian men once held at Guantanamo.
Of those remaining at Guantanamo, seven — including Mohammed and his 9/11 co-defendants — face active cases. Two others of the 26 total have been convicted and sentenced by the military commission.
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Supreme Court rejects Wisconsin parents’ challenge to school guidance
Legal World News |
2024/12/11 10:12
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The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Wisconsin parents who wanted to challenge a school district’s guidance for supporting transgender students.
The justices, acting in a case from Eau Claire, left in place an appellate ruling dismissing the parents’ lawsuit.
Three justices, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, would have heard the case. That’s one short of what is needed for full review by the Supreme Court.
Parents with children in Eau Claire public schools argued in a lawsuit that the school district’s policy violates constitutional protections for parental rights and religious freedom.
Sixteen Republican-led states had urged the court to take up the parents’ case.
Lower courts had found that the parents lacked the legal right, or standing. Among other reasons, the courts said no parent presented evidence that the policy affected them or their children.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals included two judges Republican Donald Trump appointed during his first term.
But Alito described the case as presenting “a question of great and growing national importance,” whether public school districts violate parents’ rights when they encourage students to transition or assist in the process without parental consent or knowledge.
“Administrative Guidance for Gender Identity Support” encourages transgender students to reach out to staff members with concerns and instructs employees to be careful who they talk to about a student’s gender identity, since not all students are “out” to their families. |
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Court seems reluctant to block state bans on medical treatments for minors
Legal World News |
2024/12/04 12:06
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Hearing a high-profile culture-war clash, a majority of the Supreme Court seemed reluctant Wednesday to block Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
The justices’ decision, not expected for several months, could affect similar laws enacted by another 25 states and a range of other efforts to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.
The case is coming before a conservative-dominated court after a presidential election in which Donald Trump and his allies promised to roll back protections for transgender people.
In arguments that passed the two-hour mark Wednesday, five conservative justices voiced varying degrees of skepticism of arguments made by the Biden administration and lawyers for Tennessee families challenging the ban.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted in the majority in a 2020 case in favor of transgender rights, questioned whether judges, rather than lawmakers, should be weighing in on a question of regulating medical procedures, an area usually left to the states.
”The Constitution leaves that question to the people’s representatives, rather than to nine people, none of whom is a doctor,” Roberts said in an exchange with ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio.
The court’s three liberal justices seem firmly on the side of the challengers. But it’s not clear that any of the court’s six conservatives will go along. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion in 2020, has yet to say anything.
Four years ago, the court ruled in favor of Aimee Stephens, who was fired by a Michigan funeral home after she informed its owner that she was a transgender woman. The court held that transgender people, as well as gay and lesbian people, are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace.
The Biden administration and the families and health care providers who challenged the Tennessee law are urging the justices to apply the same sort of analysis that the majority, made up of liberal and conservative justices, embraced in the case four years ago when it found that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers’ decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.
The issue in the Tennessee case is whether the law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which requires the government to treat similarly situated people the same.
Tennessee’s law bans puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors, but not “across the board,” lawyers for the families wrote in their Supreme Court brief. The lead lawyer, Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union, is the first openly transgender person to argue in front of the justices. |
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‘The Mentalist’ star Simon Baker admits drinking and driving in Australia
Legal World News |
2024/09/11 08:36
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Australian actor and director Simon Baker, best known for his role as Patrick Jane in the CBS drama series “The Mentalist,” avoided a conviction Wednesday after pleading guilty to a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol near his rural home.
The 55-year-old appeared in the Mullumbimby Local Court in New South Wales state for sentencing after pleading guilty the week before to a charge of driving with a blood-alcohol concentration exceeding the legal limit of 0.05%.
Baker acted alongside Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in the Oscar-nominated 2006 film “The Devil Wears Prada” before starring as a former professional psychic who became a California Bureau of Investigation consultant in the hit series “The Mentalist” for eight seasons until 2015. He has worked on multiple shows and movies since, including a movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “ Klara and the Sun ” directed by Taika Waititi with an expected 2025 release.
Magistrate Kathy Crittenden accepted that Baker was remorseful and was unlikely to drive after drinking again. She released him on a nine-month good behavior bond with no conviction recorded. Australian judges have discretion to not record a conviction against first-time offenders under exceptional circumstances.
Police reported seeing Baker’s Tesla electric car driving erratically in the fashionable Byron Bay region where he lives at 2:11 a.m. July 20.
That was hours after a faulty software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike created worldwide technological havoc, disrupting airlines, hospitals, government offices and financial systems. Crittenden said the outage knocked police systems offline and an electronic breath test could not be completed on Baker.
She said police resorted to an “old-fashioned sobriety test.”
Police reported Baker was unsteady on his feet and smelled of alcohol. He told police he had consumed four glasses of wine over dinner since 6 p.m., roughly eight hours prior. He was alone in the car.
Baker was “very polite and cooperative” and “extremely remorseful for his actions,” Crittenden said. Baker had since completed a traffic offenders’ rehabilitation program, the court was told.
Crittenden said four character references were tendered to the court about Baker’s community contributions, significant remorse and attesting to his conduct being out of character.
“The court has little difficulty in finding that Mr. Baker is remorseful for his offending and it is unlikely he will offend again,” she said. |
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