Pleading for Leniency

In a far cry from her earlier defiant tone in claiming that she was only zealously representing her terrorist clients, Lynne Stewart is now pleading for leniency as her sentencing is upon her.

After a trial of more than seven months, Ms. Stewart was convicted in February 2005 of providing aid to terrorism. Her sentencing has been repeatedly postponed because of her treatments for breast cancer, which she first discovered last November.

Ms. Stewart sent the letter on Tuesday to the judge in the case, John G. Koeltl of Federal District Court in Manhattan, appealing to him for leniency when he decides her sentence. The sentencing is now set for Oct. 16, and prosecutors, citing “a pattern of purposeful and willful” criminal conduct, have asked for a prison term of 30 years. Lawyers for Ms. Stewart, who is 66, have asked the judge to spare her any prison time.

The somber letter is the first time since she was convicted that Ms. Stewart has addressed herself directly to the judge to explain her actions, rather than allowing her lawyers to speak for her.

Her argument is strikingly different from her testimony during the trial, when she admitted no wrongdoing and confidently defended her provocative legal strategies in her defense of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist Islamic cleric from Egypt who is serving a life sentence for a thwarted 1993 plot to bomb New York landmarks.

Now Ms. Stewart admits that she intentionally broke strict rules that barred the sheik from communicating with his followers outside the prison, when she conveyed messages from him to the press in June 2000. But she insists that she “tested the limits” of the law only as a zealous lawyer, and never intended to help the sheik’s terrorist followers, whose goals she did not share.

For those who think that the war on terror is a law enforcement action, consider the ramifications of doing so when it will be left to the whims of lawyers and judges to determine whether terrorists are convicted of crimes of which they're accused, and the failure to obtain convictions because the evidence might not be to the criminal legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt may lead to the release of terrorists to try again, or produce sentencing that leads to these terrorists' releases where they can again commit acts of terror. The law enforcement approach puts the war on terror in the hands of the courts, not the executive or legislative branches, both of which have the power (particularly the executive) to fight a war on terror including killing terrorists operating against the US overseas before they can hit targets within the US.