New Scrutiny for Law on Detaining Witnesses

[Rose Siding]

A 22-year-old federal law that allows people to be held without charges if they have information about others' crimes is coming under fresh scrutiny in the courts, in Congress and within the Justice Department after reports that it has been abused in terrorism investigations.

The law allows so-called material witnesses to be held long enough to secure their testimony if there is reason to think they will flee. But lawyers for people detained as material witnesses say the law has been used to hold people who the government fears will commit terrorist acts in the future but whom it lacks probable cause to charge with a crime.

Concerns about how the law has been used have prompted calls from across the political spectrum for a reassessment. That debate has also ignited a broader one: whether the United States should join the several Western nations that have straightforward preventive detention laws.
.....
A department spokesman did not respond to requests for more current numbers. The department has for three years refused to give Congress fresher data on material witness detentions in terrorism investigations.

"They claim that they can't even tell us how many people they have detained" because of court sealing orders and grand jury secrecy rules, said Julie Katzman, a lawyer on Senator Leahy's staff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/politics/22witness.html?ex=1300683600&en=1dd52b580726111e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

[gratuitous]

1. Every law like this ends up being abused

It's just not possible to craft a law like this that doesn't lend itself to abuse. It starts off with the highest motives: We want to protect the most vulnerable witnesses to the most heinous crimes. Then it starts creeping, and 20 years later, there is no public record, no public access, no public review of who's being detained or for how long, and another American gulag is born.

But it's for our own protection.

[wakeme2008]

2. My standard reply on this is "President Hillary will love it "

:grr:

[Demeter]

3. BushCo Can Pervert ANYTHING

Look at the job they did on Jesus, the 10 Commandments, and the Constitution!

[hang a left]

4. You mean there was something on the DOJ's wishlist that wasn't

granted when they passed the new and improved Patriot Act???? Well, they will pick it up next time. Last paragraph of the article:

snip>

"The most confident prediction you can make," Professor Cole said, "is that after the next attack, a preventive detention statute will be proposed."