I judged a national moot court competition on Friday afternoon, March 10th at the King County Courthouse. I was part of a three person panel - all women - Judge Mary Yu and Beth Barrett Bloom - who heard arguments from two teams from law schools in Chicago. The competitors were excellent and I was pleased to learn that the one that impressed me the most, had only recently been arguing the side for the petitioner which showed versatility and deep understanding of the issues.

The problem the students were given was that of a fictitious driver/bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden who had been captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 by U.S. forces. He had been held at Guatanamo ever since. He had filed (like many real petitioners) a writ of habeus corpus. A Writ of Habeus Corpus was considered ESSENTIAL by our founders in that it would keep a government from imprisioning its citizens without due cause. Such write forces the government into stating exactly the reasons that it is holding the prisoner and move it toward a trial of those charges. This administration, by keeping these men prisoners for almost five years without charges and in fact claiming that they be kept indefinetely without charges to prevent unnamed prospective crimes, is precisely the abuses perpetrated by the British Empire and what our founders sought to prevent. Someone that the government simply did not like, or did not like the views they expoused would simply be arrested and thrown in prison and held there until King or minions felt like letting the person out.

The students arguing for the government had the most difficult argument and the first student that argued played fast and loose with the facts. While the accused may have transported weapons, she went too far when she suggested that he had transported weapons used on September 11th - I skeptically asked "What, box-cutters? Mr. Hasan personally transported box cutters that were then shipped to the United States and used in the attacks?" She retracted the comment as well as her sweeping the Hamid ruling another case that agreed with the President had broad powers, disregarding that the holding in Hamid had pointed out limitations to the executive power. Lastly, she had to admit that it was the view of the administration that it could hold a priisoner indefinently, for they were not going to charge him with anything as of yet, and lastly and bitterest pill to swallow was that the imprisonment was prospective, rather than for crimes already committed. Any crimes could be prospective and imprisoning someone for a crime they could possibly commit is anathema to the foundation of the republic.

But the petitioner also had problems wanting to call himself a POW and use the Geneva Conventions. For more on this interesting problems you can go to: http://www.hnba.com/documents/2006MootCourtCompetitionProblem.pdf