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Convicted jihad-enabling attorney Lynne Stewart complains that her free speech rights were violated

Feb 29, 2012 11:00 am By Robert Spencer

Islamic supremacists and their useful idiots on the Left, like Lynne Stewart, routinely engage in massive projection, accusing their foes of that which they themselves are guilty. Right now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and its allies in the U.S., such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), are engaged in a full-throttle effort to compel Western countries to criminalize truthful speech about Islam and jihad, and to demonize and marginalize those who dare to tell those truths. Islamic supremacist thugs more and more frequently, brazenly and violently disrupt talks by freedom fighters on university campuses. But here jihad-enabling lawyer Lynne Stewart is complaining that her free speech rights were violated for statements she made about how she was glad she enabled jihad, and would do it again. The question is, did she or did she not aid the jihadists? If so, then she deserves what she got.

However, if her old friend Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman is freed (a story I broke here in the English-language press last night), why not Lynne Stewart?

“Convicted Ex-Attorney Stewart Tells Circuit Her Free Speech Rights Were Violated,” by Mark Hamblett for the New York Law Journal, March 1:

Attorney Herald Price Fahringer ran into a dubious appeals court this morning as he argued that disbarred defense attorney Lynne Stewart was unfairly punished for free speech when her comments outside the courthouse helped persuade a judge to more than triple her prison sentence in 2010.

Before a courtroom filled with Stewart supporters, Mr. Fahringer told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that Southern District Judge John Koeltl (See Profile) violated Ms. Stewart’s First Amendment rights at resentencing when he found the statements she made after her initial sentencing in 2006 showed a lack of remorse.

Ms. Stewart was convicted in 2005 of providing material support to a designated terror group by passing messages to and from her imprisoned client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, and his followers in the outlawed Islamic Group in Egypt.

She was initially sentenced on Oct. 16, 2006, by Judge Koeltl to 28 months and afterwards met her supporters outside the courthouse, where she crowed that she could serve the sentence “standing on my head.” Ms. Stewart later said in a recorded interview that “I’d like to think that i would not do anything differently” and “I would do it again.”

The Second Circuit upheld her conviction in 2009 but reversed on the sentence. The court sent it back to Judge Koeltl for further examination in light of perjury Ms. Stewart committed on the witness stand, the application of sentencing enhancement for committing a crime of terrorism, and her role in abusing a position of trust as a lawyer, such as when she broke a signed promise to abide by a prison gag order on the sheikh, most seriously by communicating his green light on the resumption of terror attacks by the Islamic Group.

But when the circuit remanded her case in 2009, Ms. Stewart’s post-sentencing comments were also on the table, as Judge John M. Walker Jr. (See Profile) dissented from Judges Robert D. Sack (See Profile) and Guido Calabresi (See Profile) on the reasons for overturning a sentence he called “breathtakingly low.” (NYLJ, Nov. 18, 2009).

Judge Koeltl then took those comments into account when he ordered a stunned Ms. Stewart to prison for 10 years.

Mr. Fahringer told the circuit panel this morning that it was wrong to punish Ms. Stewart for comments made “on the steps of the courthouse,” where there has always been “much wider latitude” for speech.

Read Ms. Stewart’s brief.

He urged the panel not to go “down that road” because “no one will be able to comment after a sentence for fear that the same thing could happen to them.”

The argument did not appear to persuade the panel, which was made up of the same three judges who remanded the case for resentencing.

“I’m not sure freedom of speech means absolute immunity from the consequences of what you say,” Judge Sack said.

Mr. Fahringer said the problem was that Ms. Stewart’s comments were ambiguous….

Read it all.

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Filed Under: courtroom jihad, free speech


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