New Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter on Friday released four inmates from jail who he claims were being held in violation of their constitutional right to adequate legal representation after the Hurricane Katrina disaster . Hunter postponed the trials until effective counsel can be provided to the inmates, charged with three misdemeanor [...]
Defense attorneys for Jose Padilla , now formally accused of being an al Qaeda agent, moved this week to dismiss the charges against him based on allegedly illegal actions by the prosecution. Padilla's attorneys accuse the US government of subjecting him to severe physical abuse and threats, including sleep deprivation and stress positions, during his [...]
Sudan Ambassador to the UN Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem on Friday disputed the latest report from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the UN Security Council on ongoing violations of human rights in country's Darfur region, claiming that many of the alleged violations were "fabricated" by partial non-governmental organizations. Annan’s report, submitted Thursday, blamed the violence and abuses [...]
Ex-Enron vice-president Paula Rieker was sentenced Friday to 2 years probation for insider trading, avoiding up to ten years' imprisonment. Judge Melinda Harmon of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas reduced Rieker's sentence in exchange for her cooperation with investigators in the prosecutions of Enron founder Kenneth Lay and CEO Jeffrey [...]
The US Government Accountability Office says that erroneous terror watch lists are delaying thousands of travelers moving in and through the United States. A GAO report on the lists published last Friday noted:Although the total number of misidentifications that have occurred as a result of watch-list-related screening conducted by all frontline-screening agencies and airlines is [...]
Affidavit, Heather N. Cerveny, US Marine Corps, October 6, 2006 . Read the full text of the affidavit . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
A top US Marine Corps lawyer has called for an investigation of alleged abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay after reviewing a sworn statement filed by a Marine paralegal who said that last month she spoke with a group of off-duty Marines who identified themselves as guards and bragged of beating and abusing prisoners. The [...]
British human rights group Reprieve accused the United States in a report issued Friday of using Germany's Ramstein Air Base as a detention center for renditions . Reprieve's sources claim that some of the 14 "high-value" terror suspects transferred from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay last month were formerly held at an air base [...]
Canadian prosecutor Robert Petit , one of the two active prosecutors for the Cambodian genocide tribunal that will try former leaders of the Khmer Rouge , told a meeting of international prosecutors at The Hague Friday that the prosecution team will be ready to present cases to an investigating judge by the end of the [...]
The US Supreme Court announced Friday that it will reconsider the death penalty sentence of LaRoyce Lathair Smith, convicted of murdering a 19-year-old Dallas Taco Bell manager in 1991. The Court initially reversed Smith's death sentence in a 2004 per curiam opinion because jurors were not instructed to consider mitigating evidence of Smith's personal circumstances [...]
