This kind of shit has been going on for a while now: locking up people who are considered “material witnesses”. Arrested but not charged, held indefinitely without being accused of any crime. I don’t know if this comes under the “Patriot Act”, but 9/11, and our apparently perpetual “time of war”, have definitely been used as an excuse for what seems to me a terrible abuse of power.
(Coincidentally, I’m right now hearing on the radio that today, April 4, is the day Winston Smith starts his diary in 1984. Sorry if that seems like a non-sequitor.)
Anyway, this hasn’t gotten much attention in the press; I thought that would change when it started happening to American citizens. Now it has: Link to CNN, but I’m not hearing much about it.
Maybe that’s because this guy, Maher “Mike” Hawash, is a naturalized citizen, and an Arab-American. Maybe when a white native-born citizen with an Anglo-Saxon name – say, a guy named Christian White – is arrested and held in solitary confinement for weeks without being charged with a crime, there’ll be some coverage and some hard questions for people like John Ashcroft about when they’re going to either charge Christian White with a crime or let him go home to all the little Whites.
(I put this in the Pit out of concern that when I talk about Ashcroft, the words “insane motherfucker” might come out. Oops.)
Anway, for any lawyers here, what’s the deal with “material witnesses”? How long can the cops (or in this case, the FBI) hold you without charging you with something?
The statute at question is 18 U.S.C. Section 3144, which states:
This statute allows the government to detain somebody who has been shown to be a material witness in a case indefinitely until the case is resolved. It’s application has been held constitutional in cases where a defendant has been charged and is awaiting trial. In Bacon v. United States, 449 F.2d 933, 937-941 (9th Cir. 1971), the Ninth Circuit allowed this type of detention to be used to hold a material witness in anticipation of his testimony before a Grand Jury. However, in United States v. Awadallah III, 202 F.Supp.2d 55 (S.D.N.Y. 2002), a Judge ruled that the material witness statute should not apply to grand jury investigations. Awadallah was recently criticized in In re Application of U.S. for a Material Witness Warrant, 213 F.Supp.2d 287, 288+ (S.D.N.Y. Jul 11, 2002). I believe both these cases are currently on appeal. Finally, The Supreme Court has stated that a statute which permits indefinite detention of people, except in such cases as a criminal conviction or a finding that a person poses a threat to himself or others as the result of mental illness, would raise a serious constitutional problem under the Due Process Clause.
Just from my quick research, it sounds like this kind of detention is allowed, but each day the detention goes on without a grand jury being called, the more likely it will be found to be unconstitutional.
And just so you know, Awadallah was an Arab-American, and not a “white native-born citizen with an Anglo-Saxon name, so kindly knock it off with the race baiting. It demeans your argument.
Thanks for the enlightening legal info. However, it’s not race-baiting. I wasn’t talking about treatment in the courts, but treatment in the press; I think the case would be getting more attention if Hawash were not Arab-American. Also, if some of the stuff I’ve heard on talk radio is any indication, there are plenty of people prejudiced against anybody with an Islamic name, and also against immigrants, even ones who have gained citizenship. (I might be wrong about this, which would be good.)
I should have mentioned that after two weeks Hawash hadn’t even been questioned.
Four percent works out to about 4,400 people arrested as material witnesses in 1999 by the Feds alone (remember that State and local authorities can also arrest people as material witnesses).
You may well ask if this arrest would have received more attention if Mr. Hawash wasn’t an Arab-American, but I tend to suspect that if Mr. Hawash wasn’t an Arab-American it would have received no attention at all.
You have to remember - John Ashcroft is a man who lost to a dead man in Missouri. Can’t forget that. Choices in Missouri were: John Ashcroft…dead man. People in Missouri went, “I’m sorry, John. The dead man scares me less than you do.”
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if John Ashcroft decreed I have to wear a push-up bra and wear my hear like Betty Grable’s, so it’s nice to have some facts to calm me down.
Maybe the shit you ranted about back in April wasn’t shit after all. Maybe that insane “asshole Ashcroft” and his band of of evil browner-than-me hating Nazis over at the DOJ knew a little bit more about what that lying, no-good, anti-western, inhuman, infidel-hating pile of spunk than you did.
Doesn’t sound like the actions of an innocent, American citizen to me.
You can continue to claim he was railroaded by the evil, American, white power structure here if you wish…you’re just going to have to modify your conspiracy theory to include:
Prosecutorial brain-washing
and
Secret arm twisting techniques that forced this model citizen to confess to something he didn’t do.
Looks to me like the OP was initially complaining that the guy was being held without being charged with any crime, questioned, etc., for an indefinite length of time, and suggesting that no one was paying any attention in the media because the guy’s of Arab descent. I don’t see any claims of innocence being made. Thanks for the knee-jerk, though.
The confession isn’t the definitive end to the issue and it never really was. That’s not to say this guy isn’t guilty. But it’s not that hard to get a confession out of innocent people.
Though, strictly speaking, we were voting for a dead man, really we were voting for the dead man’s wife. I don’t know if that’s much better, but there it is. Jean Carnahan is, thus far, the only Democrat I ever voted for in an election, so that should show what I think of Ashcroft and the latest of his anti-liberty toadies they threw out there (Jim “No” Talent.)
Of course, IMHO we could replace the entire government with dead people and we’d end up with a much better country. Dead people have a really tough time fucking things up, due to the handicap of being dead.
And I echo Guin’s remark. I haven’t taken Con Law yet (schedule problems, so I had to take it 3rd year) but I also thought there had been some backlash to Abe Lincoln’s paranoid tyranny in which we settled the fact that we can’t just go around suspending habeus corpus no matter how admirable the goal.
I don’t understand all the flap about Ashcroft. Ronnie Raygun made the Bill of Rights null and void with the R.I.C.O Act. Yea,strange cite, but these guys are experts.
Wow! You brought my little thread back after four months! That really is buck wild!
And, you’re buck wrong! I never said I thought the dude was innocent. I was talking about the rights of the accused, which are not affected by whether the accused is guilty or not. And it’s not a conspiracy theory, just complaints about stuff the DOJ is doing.
First of all, what the OP is complaining about is what occurs BEFORE we are sure of the guilt/innocence of the suspect. Innocent until proven guilty, remember?
And second, the OP does not say we should have let him go, merely that if we were confident that he had done something wrong, then he should have simply been charged with the crime.
Due process is one of the things that separate a representative republic from a dictatorship. It takes a strong and confident nation to maintain due process in the face of a virulent threat like terrorism; I believe we’re strong enough.