Suspect conviction

U.S. v. Padilla: a transparent case of federal overreach

Editor, The Times:

In its post-9/11 delirium, the Bush administration rounded up Jose Padilla and hundreds like him in an illegal sweep that led to a systematic trashing of the writ of habeas corpus, the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions.

" Plain-vanilla justice " [Times editorial, Aug. 18] correctly alluded to some of this in praising the Padilla verdict. But what you failed to mention was that the government, basing its case on hearsay, a handful of threadbare wiretaps and the complicity of an insane man (Padilla himself), had no case.

Never mind the wholesale criminality of U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo barely crossed your pages in the interim. Padilla is now a changed man in the worst way.

When the government is forced by the courts to try a mentally ill prisoner on trumped-up charges, your conclusion is that the system works. Really.

Padilla may have been guilty of being a moron, but he was likely no terrorist. Even so, in a world where editorial writers conclude that torture victims are guilty because they "confess," it's not hard to see how a jury could bring home a conviction.

Complicit dupes abound.

-- Rhett Gambol, Seattle

Broadsword of justice

"Plain-vanilla justice" is laudable as far as it went — that is, the advice to George W. Bush to use a tested system to hold terrorists accountable. But when you take the case of Jose Padilla as your example, it is regrettable that you stopped so short with your definition of justice.

You left out that Padilla was snatched up and held for five years (!) without charges, except those given to the media; and without right to an attorney. And even worse, for three of those five years, he was held in solitary confinement and tortured via sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and continual interrogation.

After all that, all of the frighteningly emotional media-released charges were dropped and he was convicted of conspiracy! [" Padilla's conviction bears little resemblance to original charges ," News, Aug 17.] And even then he was tried only because a court decision forced it. The conviction on conspiracy was "plain vanilla" all right, and it may have been warranted, but "justice"? Not in my book.

-- Bill Griffin, Shoreline

Exhibits 6 and 8

"Plain-vanilla justice" makes complete sense. Unless you consider that the denial of the writ of habeas corpus makes sense even though it's both explicitly spelled out in the U.S. Constitution and a part of the tradition of English common law from which we derive our system of government.

It makes complete sense to consider Jose Padilla waiting for a trial for more than four years a vindication of our legal system, unless you read the Sixth Amendment, whereby the right to a speedy trial is guaranteed.

It makes sense also if you don't count the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits the use of cruel and unusual punishment.

Finally, the crimes for which Padilla has been found guilty are not those of which he was initially accused. He was said to be on the verge of creating a dirty bomb. And yet, after four-plus years, the Justice Department was unable to make its case.

The conspiracy charges for which he was found guilty were described by law professor Peter S. Margulies of Roger Williams University as "highly amorphous, and it basically allows someone to be found guilty for something that is one step away from a thought crime."

How can there be any way that this trial can be used as a good example of justice in our country?

-- Geoff Kirk, Bellevue