Political prisoners in the US: Pete Seeger: “Lynn Stewart Should be outa jail!”

[HiPointDem]

PETITION TO FREE LYNNE STEWART: SAVE HER LIFE – RELEASE HER NOW!

CLICK TO SIGN PETITION:
http://www.change.org/petitions/petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-save-her-life-release-her-now-2

Lynne Stewart has devoted her life to the oppressed – a constant advocate for the countless many deprived in the United States of their freedom and their rights.

Unjustly charged and convicted for the “crime” of providing her client with a fearless defense, the prosecution of Lynne Stewart is an assault upon the basic freedoms of us all.

After years of post-conviction freedom, her bail was revoked arbitrarily and her imprisonment ordered, precluding surgery she had scheduled in a major New York hospital.

Since her imprisonment in the Federal Prison in Carswell, Texas her urgent need for surgery was delayed 18 months – so long, that the operating physician pronounced the condition as “the worst he had seen.”

Now, breast cancer, which had been in remission prior to her imprisonment, has reached Stage Four. It has appeared in her lymph nodes, on her shoulder, in her bones and her lungs.

Her daughter, a physician, has sounded the alarm: “Under the best of circumstances, Lynne would be in a battle of the most serious consequences with dangerous odds. With cancer and cancer treatment, the complications can be as debilitating and as dangerous as the cancer itself.”

In her current setting, where trips to physicians involve attempting to walk with 10 pounds of shackles on her wrists and ankles, with connecting chains, Lynne Stewart has lacked ready access to physicians and specialists under conditions compatible with medical success.

It can take weeks to see a medical provider in prison conditions. It can take weeks to report physical changes and learn the results of treatment; and when held in the hospital, Lynne has been shackled wrist and ankle to the bed.

This medieval “shackling” has little to do with any appropriate prison control. She is obviously not an escape risk.

We demand abolition of this practice for all prisoners, let alone those facing surgery and the urgent necessity of care and recovery.

It amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of human rights.

We cry out against the bureaucratic murder of Lynne Stewart.

If Lynne’s original sentence of 28 months had not been unreasonably, punitively increased to 10 years, she would be home now — where her medical care would be by her choice and where those who love her best would care for her. Her isolation from this loving care would end.

Free Lynne Stewart Now!

http://lynnestewart.org/page/2/


Lynne Irene Stewart (born October 8, 1939) is a former attorney who represented controversial, poor, and often unpopular defendants who was convicted on charges of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists in 2005,[1] and sentenced to 28 months in prison. Her felony conviction led to her being automatically disbarred.

She was convicted of helping pass messages from her client, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian cleric convicted of planning terror attacks, to his followers in al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, an organization designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States Secretary of State.

She was re-sentenced on July 15, 2010, to 10 years in prison in light of her alleged perjury at her trial.[2] She is currently serving her sentence at FMC Carswell in Ft Worth, Texas.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Stewart

[DonCoquixote]

1. Does that mean

that she should get a pass for passing messages to the organization that was planning to kill people? It is one thing to defend a case, another to help someone kill people behind bars, which is what her client was doing.

[HiPointDem]

3. you don't know anything about the case.

[DonCoquixote]

4. actually,it is up for anyone to read

http://ccrjustice.org/sentencing-of-lynne-stewart-michael-steven-smith


It was on the occasion of a post-conviction prison visit that Lynne helped her client. She released his statement to Reuters press service announcing his withdrawal of support for a ceasefire between his group and the Egyptian government. This was in violation of a Special Administrative Measure (SAMs) that Lynne had agreed to with the U.S. Government. She wasn’t supposed to be a medium for communication between her client and the outside world. She should have challenged the constitutionality of the SAMs, she now realizes, and not just have violated them.

[HiPointDem]

5. you don't know anything about the case.

In 2000, I visited the sheikh, and he asked me to make a press release. This press release had to do with the current status of an organization that at that point was basically defunct, the Gama’a al-Islamiyya. And I agreed to do that. In May of — maybe it was later than that. Sometime in 2000, I made the press release.

Interestingly enough, we found out later that the Clinton administration, under Janet Reno, had the option to prosecute me, and they declined to do so, based on the notion that without lawyers like me or the late Bill Kunstler or many that I could name, the cause of justice is not well served. They need the gadflies.

So, at any rate, they made me sign onto the agreement again not to do this. They did not stop me from representing him. I continued to represent him.

And it was only after 9/11, in April of 2002, that John Ashcroft came to New York, announced the indictment of me, my paralegal and the interpreter for the case, on grounds of materially aiding a terrorist organization. One of the footnotes to the case, of course, is that Ashcroft also appeared on nationwide television with Letterman that night ballyhooing the great work of Bush’s Justice Department in indicting and making the world safe from terrorism.

I think I should have been a little more savvy that the government would come after me. But do anything differently? I don’t — I’d like to think I would not do anything differently, Amy. I made these decisions based on my understanding of what the client needed, what a lawyer was expected to do. They say that you can’t distinguish zeal from criminal intent sometimes. I had no criminal intent whatsoever. This was a considered decision based on the need of the client. And although some people have said press releases aren’t client needs, I think keeping a person alive when they are in prison, held under the conditions which we now know to be torture, totally incognito — not incognito, but totally held without any contact with the outside world except a phone call once a month to his family and to his lawyers, I think it was necessary. I would do it again. I might handle it a little differently, but I would do it again.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/18/exclusive_civil_rights_attorney_lynne_stewart

[DonCoquixote]

6. so in other words

She has not problem with the fact her client used her to cordinate killing people in Egypt? Sorry, she loses her halo right there.

[HiPointDem]

7. that's not what happened. and you don't know anything about the case.

[DonCoquixote]

8. chanting a mantra

will not change the fact of what she did. Kindly explain how what she did was NOT putting lives at risk?

[DonCoquixote]

2. that beign said

she needs access to medical care...which means if the prison has to pay every penny for real treatment, it must.