'93 WTC plotter Ramzi Yousef wants contact ban lifted
The convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing wants nearly two decades of communication restrictions lifted, arguing he's no longer a threat to national security, his lawyer said Sunday.
Ramzi Yousef has been locked away in solitary confinement at the federal "Supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado, since 1998. A 15-page list of rules sets limits on his contact with relatives, lawyers and other inmates. He can read books and watch television, but newspapers and magazines are censored to keep him from receiving messages planted in classified ads or letters to the editor.
Now 44, Yousef "no longer should be considered a national security threat," his lawyer, Bernard Kleinman, told CNN. "If the government feels that he is, they should provide some reasonable basis that they can corroborate as to why he is a continuing national security threat."
U.S. District Judge Kevin Duffy, who sentenced Yousef to life plus 20 years, called him "a virus that must be locked away." He was arrested in 1996 in a plot to bomb U.S. airliners in Asia, and he's the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- the accused mastermind of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people and brought down the World Trade Center.
full: http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/17/us/terrorist-prison/index.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Call me an Eighth Amendment purist.
with the prisoner on 8th Amendment issues. It's a legitimate question for the court, in any case. One can imagine conditions changing such that the trial record would be moot given changes in circumstances. A Weather Underground terrorist serving a life sentence, for instance, would have a legitimate 8th Amendment claim on a similar restriction imposed at sentencing (in, say, 1974), and in that case, it would be - to my mind - incumbent on the government to prove ongoing risk.
It is the government asking for a special dispensation relative to standard 8th Amendment practices, so I believe the government has the burden to show cause for continuing exemption from guaranteed constitutional rights.
I am not arguing that "The mere passage of time is 'an' indicator that he's lost his desire to commit mass murder," as that would be stupid.
There are numerous ways that a threat can dissipate to the point that these provisions contrary to standard 8th Amendment practices would no longer be necessary. My example showed one obvious case: the very network constituting the threat has completely disappeared (Weather Underground). Another way would be if the subject's capacity or desire or ability to work with and influence an existing network dissipated. And there are other ways, too.
My point is quite simple: for the extraordinary exemption from 8th Amendment protections (and I put the 8th up there with the First as "most important"
, the government can be bothered to show and prove from time to time - to demonstrate an ongoing need. This isn't a crazy or flippant call. It holds the government to a high standard when it comes to protection from cruel and unusual punishment. To me, that's not controversial.
I want them to have to mull on what they did and the DP is just too easy a way out.
Hope you're having a good President's Day.
