Litigation

High Court to Decide Whether Ashcroft Can be Sued

By Peter Hardin

The Supreme Court agreed today to consider whether former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft can be sued for allegedly misusing federal law to detain a terrorism suspect, who never was charged with a crime, on false pretenses.

Letting the lawsuit by Abdullah Al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen, go to trial would “severely damage law enforcement,” Obama administration lawyers said in an appeal on Ashcroft’s behalf, according to a Los Angeles Times article.

Al-Kidd (photo at left) was locked up for 16 days in federal detention, strip-searched and shackled. He sued over what he alleged was the unconstitutional use of a law meant to hold ?material witnesses,? the New York Times reported. A district court judge and a panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that his lawsuit against Ashcroft (photo at right) and others could go forward.

It was “repugnant to the Constitution,” Judge Milan Smith said, for the government to say it “has the power to arrest and detain or restrict American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions, not because they have committed a crime, but merely because the government wants to investigate them for possible wrongdoing.”

In other dispatches about the high court:

• Justice Samuel Alito said he doubted he will be in attendance in the House of Representatives when President Obama delivers his annual State of the Union speech in January, according to an Associated Press article.
• Americans generally have agreed with key decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court since its shift to the right four years ago, according to a study that was the subject of a Los Angeles Times article. A glaring exception: the Citizens United decision on campaign finance law.
• A Washington Post article examined the first weeks of the Supreme Court’s new term under the headline, “In important cases, Supreme Court outcomes sometimes determined by a single word.”

Full post as published by The Gavel on October 18, 2010 (boomark / email).