'No evidence was taken; no trial was conducted'- US forces death sentence

bobbieinok

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Fri Oct-20-06 09:10 PM
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'No evidence was taken; no trial was conducted'- US forces death sentence

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/10/american-sentenced-to-death-in-iraq.html

Saturday, October 14, 2006
An American Sentenced to Death in Iraq

Scott Horton

"Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice."

- Franz Kafka, Der Process, chapter 10 (1925)

Today the Associated Press reports the case of an American citizen, Mohammed Munaf, seized by US Forces in Iraq in 2005. Munaf was hauled before the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, and sentenced to death following a proceeding that appears to have been extracted from a novel by Franz Kafka. By far the most distressing aspect of the entire affair is the role played in it by US Forces. "wo U.S. military officials - including a soldier claiming to represent the Romanian Embassy - demanded that Munaf be found 'guilty and should be executed,' the papers say."

Yesterday afternoon I spoke with one of Munaf's American lawyers, and in the evening I discussed the case with one of the Iraqi lawyers who handled it. The judge, he said, had at a prior hearing informed defense counsel that he had reviewed the entire file and had reached a decision to dismiss the charges. "There is no material evidence against your client," he was quoted as stating. When two US officers appeared at the trial date with the prisoner, they reacted with anger when told of the Court's decision – and made clear it was "unacceptable." One of these US officers purported to speak on behalf of the Romanian Embassy, which, he said "demanded the death penalty." (The Government of Romania has since stated both that it had no authorized representative at the hearing and that it did not demand the death penalty). They then insisted upon and got an ex parte meeting with the judge - from which the defendant and his lawyers were excluded. Afterwards an ashen-faced judge emerged, returned to his court and proceeded to sentence the American to death. No evidence was taken; no trial was conducted. The sentence was entered on the basis of a demand by the two American officers that their fellow countryman be put to death.

Further details of this amazing development are found in papers filed by the Brennan Center in an emergency application to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

On Tuesday, the President intends to sign the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which purports to terminate the writ of habeas corpus for US detainees overseas. In so doing, he may well be confirming a death sentence for Mohammed Manaf. This case is shocking because it deals with an American citizen who is being stripped of his rights under a foreign legal process, including the right to a trial, at the insistence of US Forces. It provides strong grounds to question what US Forces are doing in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. As a practitioner in that court, I can only say that none of the facts detailed in the Brennan Center's papers or described by the defendant's attorney strike me as surprising. They are consistent with things I observed with my own eyes in Baghdad in the spring of this year.

*****

Found from a discussion and link at

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com