LETTER FROM AMERICA: The New York Defence bar is furious. It's bad enough having to put up with a media, police, and prosecutors regularly identifying defence lawyers with their clients, necessarily often the dregs of society, but now the country's Attorney General, John Ashcroft, is coming after one of their own.
On Tuesday he announced that he is charging lawyer Lynne Stewart, a 62-year-old granny who is a tireless veteran defender of unpopular clients, with aiding terrorism. The indictment alleges she provided a conduit so that her client, the blind cleric Sheikh Abdel-Rahman (63), could communicate his ideas to his supporters.
Abdel-Rahman is serving life in federal prison after being convicted in a 1993 conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks. He is considered a spiritual leader for the men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.
It is alleged on the basis of tapes of her prison consultations with her client that she deliberately distracted a guard as the interpreter and Abdel-Rahman exchanged messages in Arabic; specifically, that she assisted him in getting out an instruction to his Islamic Group supporters in Egypt to end their ceasefire. If convicted she could face up to 20 years in jail.
(Three others also face charges, including the interpreter, of conspiring to provide material support and resources to the terrorist organisation.) Ms Stewart, who is known for her left-wing views, is indignant, deploring what she regards as an attack on vital lawyer-client privilege, and pleaded "emphatically not guilty" at her arraignment on Wednesday in a courtroom packed with fellow defence lawyers there to show support for her. She was released on $500,000 bail.
Outside, she said she was not happy but added, "I know a good fight when I see it, and I think this will be a very good fight. I'm going to continue to be a lawyer, hopefully, until they carry me out," she told reporters. "I'm sincerely hoping it won't be the US government doing the carrying." Government monitoring of lawyer-client communications has "almost a freezing effect on your ability to defend the person," she told the New York Times. "And the whole way we operate is to establish a relationship of trust. You want to know everything that happened, and then you decide if the case is defensible or not."
In her case the authorities taped her conversations under special powers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but since then wider surveillance of lawyer-client meetings has been allowed under the controversial post-September-11th Patriot Act, although they must be notified of such taping.
Ms Stewart vehemently denies she crossed the line between zealous defender and co-conspirator. "I'm not practising all these years to suddenly cross that line that I know all too well exists. I'm too long in the tooth to do that." Queens-born of school-teacher parents, the Rutgers-educated lawyer worked in the poverty and squalor of Harlem as a librarian and teacher in the 1960s.
She has an effective courtroom style that was described by one journalist as that of an "affable and affectionate aunt" and combines scepticism of the prosecution with heavy doses of gently delivered sarcasm. Her clients range from ODCs and mafiosi to alleged terrorists.
In an interview with the New York Times in 1995, while she was defending Rahman, Ms Stewart has been widely quoted as suggesting that violence and revolution were sometimes necessary to right the economic and racial wrongs of America's capitalist system. "I don't believe in anarchistic violence but in directed violence," she said. "That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism and sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support." But no one has suggested, let alone produced evidence, to show she supports the violence advocated by her client.
The government is trying "to drive away the lawyers who might zealously represent their clients by calling them traitors and criminals so that the only attorneys that are left are those court appointed hacks who let the jury know it is their despicable duty to represent these people," says Ron Kuby, who represented the sheik before Ms Stewart. "Lynne is a zealous advocate and a proud defender of the oppressed all over the world," he insists. "She was always there at any time of night when the police or the FBI were kicking in someone's door, and as a distinguished member of the New York bar, those of us who know her find these allegations to be unbelievable and politically motivated."
"I think a lot of people in this city are as dumbstruck and horrified as I am," Mary Pike, a former lawyer who represented the IRA's Joseph Doherty for more than a decade, told Newsday.
She recalls that the federal government pressured her during the years before Doherty was sent back to Ireland in 1992. "This is a far worse time to be a defence lawyer for an unpopular person or cause," she said, "because we are at war."
Bill Goodman, legal director for the Centre for Constitutional Rights, said attorney-client privilege was threatened and calls the case "a full-scale attack on the Bill of Rights."
