Legal News

Are Prison Officials Violating Loughner?s Fifth Amendment Rights?

By Ashby Jones

It’s been a while since we reported out any news on Jared Loughner, the man charged in the January shooting spree that left six people dead and critically injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

But lawyers for Loughner on Wednesday filed an interesting motion, accusing the FBI of improperly using prison psychologists to spy on their client. Click here for the motion; here for the Politico story.

In the motion, the defense for Jared Loughner, led by Judy Clarke (pictured), asked a federal judge to bar psychologists at the Bureau of Prisons from sharing additional reports on Loughner with the FBI. The motion says that the BOP behavior conflicts with Loughner’s invocation of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The defense team wrote:

Despite his stated desire to ‘take the Fifth,” Mr. Loughner has been questioned numerous times by BOP staff, including BOP psychologists….BOP staff prepared reports which contain Mr. Loughner's verbal and non-verbal responses to their questions. The reports also detail his behavior, demeanor, affect, sleeping patterns, eating habits, facial expressions, and other visual observations of him recorded at 15 minute increments 24 hours a day. BOP staff have also carefully memorialized visits with Mr. Loughner by his attorneys and defense team members, to include observations of what took place during some of those visits.

A spokeswoman for the BOP had no immediate comment to Politico’s Josh Gerstein. A message left for the prosecution team was not immediately returned.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 03, 2011 (boomark / email).