Legal News

For Spending Nearly Five Years in Limbo, Should This Man Get Off?

By Ashby Jones

On the one hand, there’s something perhaps instinctively unsettling about a terrorism suspect invoking the Constitution’s speedy-trial right to argue why his case should be tossed. On the other, there’s also something perhaps equally unsettling about the government holding a suspect for nearly five years before filing a formal indictment.

And that’s what’s making this stage of the government’s case against Ahmed Ghailani (pictured), an interesting one. Ghailani is accused of participating in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa — one in Tanzania, the other in Kenya. The blasts killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. Ghailani, the first detained from Guantanamo Bay to face prosectuion in the U.S. has pleaded not guilty. His trial is scheduled for September.

In what the WSJ’s Suzanne Sataline calls “the first major challenge to the government’s case” against Ghailani, lawyers for Ghailani argued in federal court Monday that the case against their client should be dismissed because he was denied the right to a speedy trial. Click here for the NYT story.

But the fate of Ghaliani isn’t all that hangs in the balance. A speedy-trial ruling in favor of Ghailani could shape arguments in the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks who is scheduled to be tried in a court blocks from the World Trade Center site.

Ghailani attorney Peter Quijano argued before Manhattan federal judge Lewis Kaplan that the government violated the defendant’s right to a speedy trial while he was held at Guantanamo and camps run by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“It took 57 months to indict the man after he was captured,” Mr. Quijano said. He called the case “perhaps the most egregious violation of the right to a speedy trial ever.”

Michael Farbiarz, an assistant U.S. attorney, countered that the delay was reasonable because the U.S. had a national-security interest in holding Ghailani. The civilian attorneys who represented the suspect while he was in Guantanamo could have argued for an immediate trial, but didn’t, Mr. Farbiarz said. “The demand for a speedy trial has come too late,” he said.

Photo: AP

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 12, 2010 (boomark / email).