Lawyers Say Padilla Wants to Stay
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Yahoo Newss/AP
By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer
December 30, 2005
WASHINGTON - Lawyers for Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held as an enemy
combatant for 3 1/2 years, said Friday he wants to stay in military custody
until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear his challenge to President
Bush's power to detain Americans when the nation is at war.
The lawyers urged the high court to reject a request filed Wednesday by
Solicitor General Paul Clement seeking Padilla's immediate transfer from the
custody of the military to law enforcement authorities in Florida.
The Bush administration wants the high court to overturn last week's
decision by the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Court of Appeals, which refused to
transfer Padilla and sharply criticized the government's tactics in the lengthy
case.
The 4th Circuit took the administration to task for using one set of facts
before the courts to justify Padilla's detention without charges and another to
persuade a grand jury in Miami to indict him last month on terrorism-related
charges.
"What the government clearly wants is for this court to reject the 4th
Circuit's strong criticism of the government's conduct," Padilla's lawyers
wrote in a response requested by the high court.
Padilla's lawyers accused the administration of trying to bypass normal
judicial procedures. By getting Padilla transferred quickly to civilian
custody, they argue, the government is attempting to bolster its argument that
his broader challenge of presidential power is moot.
They said the high court "should not decide in a matter of hours or days" an
issue that raises such heady constitutional questions. Instead, Padilla's
lawyers asked the justices to put off the transfer issue until they discuss in
mid-January whether to hear Padilla's overall challenge to the president's
authority.
At issue is whether Bush and his advisers have taken too broad a view of his
authority under the Constitution's war powers provision.
Clement, in his request for Padilla's immediate transfer, took aim at the
appellate decision written by Judge J. Michael Luttig, a widely respected
conservative who had warned the administration that its changing tactics were
putting its credibility at risk.
The appeals court decision "defies both law and logic," Clement said, and
was "an unwarranted attack on the exercise of executive discretion."
Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, was arrested in 2002 at Chicago's
O'Hare Airport as he was on his way home from Afghanistan. At the time,
then-Attorney General John Ashcroft alleged that Padilla was planning to
detonate a radiological device known as a "dirty bomb."
Administration lawyers later argued before federal courts in Virginia and
New York that Padilla was part of an al-Qaida-backed plot to blow up apartment
buildings in New York, Washington or Florida.
Last month, a grand jury charged Padilla with being part of a North American
terrorism cell that raised funds and recruited fighters to wage violent jihad
outside the United States.
In their filing Friday, Padilla's lawyers wrote, "At the tail end of more
than three years of nearly incommunicado military detention, Padilla is content
to wait two more weeks in order to have his transfer approved through normal
judicial processes."
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