Padilla and Our Constitution

Padilla may or may not be guilty of the crimes with which he has been charged or, for that matter, other crimes with which he has not been charged. But whether he is or he isn’t, the Administration’s public posture in his case has been scandalous. A U.S. citizen was captured while coming off a plane and detained for more than three years without fundamental constitutional rights.

He was accused of a particularly heinous crime, loudly and publicly, but never charged with one. And then, when the courts started to close in and seriously question his confinement, the executive branch did an about face and found a smaller case and a lesser cause and a less serious charge to indict him with.

You don’t have to be sympathetic to Padilla to acknowledge how dangerous a precedent that sets. You don’t have to be a lukewarm supporter of the government’s legal war on terror to comprehend how vulnerable that makes all of us. You don’t have to be a bleeding heart to be concerned that if it can happen once it can happen again and again and again.

I can't improve on that. For the full analysis by CBS legal correspondent Andrew Cohen follow the link.

Working it backwards, Padilla was finally charged, charged after being held without cause or court order for three years. Assume for a moment that the mans is guilty of every heinous crime the government claims.  They still violated our rights as Americans, as US citizens, by holding and not charging him for over three years.

A class on the U.S. Constitution should be mandatory at grade level six or higher in very school in the United States.  Now that is a mandate I could support.

Go ACLU