These two bills are now in Congress and need your support. Either
or both bills would drastically decrease Lynne’s and other federal
inmates sentences substantially.

H.R. 1475 “FEDERAL PRISON WORK INCENTIVE ACT AMENDED 2009″
CONG. DANNY DAVIS (D-IL)

This bill will restore and amend the former federal B.O.P. good time
allowances. It will let all federal prisoners, except lifers, earn significant
reductions to their sentences. Good time would be calculated and earned
by three methods. First, base good time, earned monthly on the length of
sentence. Second, earn monthly good time days by working prison jobs.
Third, allowances for performing outstanding services or duties in
connection with institutional operations. In addition, part of this bill is to
bring back parole to federal long term prisoners.

GO TO www.FedCURE.org and www.FAMM.org

AT THIS TIME FEDERAL PRISONERS ONLY EARN 47 DAYS PER YEAR GOOD TIME. IF
H.R. 1475 PASSES LYNNE STEWART WOULD EARN 120 – 180 DAYS PER YEAR GOOD TIME!

H.R. 61 “45 AND OLDER”
REP. SHEILA JACKSON-LEE (18th Congressional District-TX)

This bill provides early release from federal prison after serving half of
the inmate’s sentence, if age  forty-five or older and never convicted of
a violent crime or violent conduct in prison.

PLEASE WRITE, CALL, EMAIL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES AND SENATORS – DEMAND THEIR VOTES!

This information brought to you by Diane E. Schindelwig a federal prisoner #36582-177
and friend and supporter of Lynne Stewart.

In one of the best selling books of this season, the heroine, Lizabeth Salander, a hardwired, brilliant young computer genius is shot and buried by the antagonist.  He is a prototype of the cruel, greedy, mysoginistic,exploiter.  She claws herself out of her premature grave and indomitable and focused, defeats him  .Finally by the end of volume 3 she has triumphed, using her own brains and relying on  her friends and comrades,  over the entire corrupt corporate, governmental, military power structure that had been trying to oppress and suppress her her whole life.

Last Thursday, Federal Judge John Koeltl attempted to bury me alive.  Acting for the Government and Judges of the 2 Circuit Court of Appeals he sentenced me at their demand to more than 5x the term he originally thought ” right and just”.  With his new sentence, of 10 years, I am buried in the Prison Industrial Complex until I am nearly 80 years old, if I make it.  But, believe me, I, like Lisabeth Salander intend to lift the dirt off and even if weakened and  wounded–regain my voice and strength !!

When the National Assembly was founded and had its first conference, it too had a formidable task–to become a democratic voice of the anti-war movement.  It too had to shift and move and overcome sectarianism.  To revive a weary, disillusioned anti war movement We have come a long way toward being the vibrant voice we envisioned  when we had the first telephone conference.  We have grown.  We have tried to stay true to the notion that everyone who attended had a voice and that important policy issues and future plans must be decided by vote of the membership.

I have been out of the steering aspect due to my “unavailability”  but my husband Ralph Poynter is still dedicated and active.  He represents both of us.  Others, too numerous to mention, close to me in my previous life, also now stand for me.   I miss many things from that life but most of all being part of the challenge to make lasting change in my lifetime by ending the scourge of imperialism and its endless wars and exploitation for ourselves and all the peoples of the world.  LONG LIVE THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

“At all times throughout history the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology.” — Karl Marx

Lynne Stewart is a friend.  She used to practice law in New York City.  I still do.  I was in the courtroom with my wife Debby the afternoon of July 19th for her re-sentencing.  Judge John Koeltl buried her alive.

We should have seen it coming when he told her to take all the time she needed at the start when she spoke before the sentence was read.  It didn’t matter what she said.  He had already written his decision, which he read out loud to a courtroom packed with supporters.  It was well crafted.  Bulletproof on appeal.  He is smart and cautious.

After about an hour into his pronouncement, he came to the buried alive part.  He prefaced it by citing the unprecedented 400 letters of support people had sent him, all of which he said he read.  He noted Lynne’s three decades of service to the poor and the outcast.  He stressed that she is a seventy-year-old breast cancer survivor with high blood pressure and other serious health problems.  And then he laid it on her: 120 months.

Everyone in the courthouse divided 120 by 12.  He had given her a death sentence, we all thought.  She’ll never get out.  He almost quadrupled the 28 month sentence he had originally pronounced.  She had told him that 28 months was a horizon, that she had hope.  But no more.

Lynne’s granddaughter gasped.  Then started sobbing.  She kept crying even as Judge John Koeltl kept reading.  And reading.  And reading.  It was awful.  The sentence was pitiless and cruel.  How to understand it?

Lynne’s lawyer Jill Shellow Levine rose after the judge finished.  She asked him why.  He was candid.  He was told to do it by his supervisors, the judges on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.  This court is an institution of the elite.  It is considered the second highest court in America next to the Supreme Court because it presides over the financial center of the empire, not its capital, that is in D.C., but its real capital.  This court makes policy and Lynne Stewart was to be made an example of in “the war against terrorism” just as a half a century before, in the same court, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were condemned to death in the war against communism, told that they had caused the deaths of 50,000 U.S. soldiers in the Korean War, and found guilty of the ridiculous charge of “stealing the secret” of the atomic bomb, when there was no secret, it was only a matter of technology.  The sentencing Judge Kaufman knew they would leave behind two orphan children, Robert and Michael, ages six and three.

In 1947 George Kennan, the ideological father of the cold war, wrote that the United States had but six per cent of the world’s population and fifty per cent of its wealth.  The problem was to keep it.  Anti-communism served as the ideological cover the U.S. ruling classes used.  But communism ceased to exist after capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union in 1991.  A new ideological cover has been constructed in the wake of the September 11th criminal attack on the World Tread Center and the Pentagon: the War against Terror.  Nationalist opposition to U.S. economic and foreign policy in parts of the Arab world is no longer led by communists but by fundamentalist Muslims.

Lynne Stewart represented one of them, Sheik Abdel Rahman, who was the leading oppositionist to the U.S.-sponsored Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt, which gets more money from America than any other country in the world except Israel. In 1993, at the behest of the Egyptian government, Sheik Rahman was criminally indicted and later convicted of the crime of “sedition” for suggesting to a government informer that rather than blow up New York City landmarks he choose “a military target.”  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.

She wasn’t prosecuted for what she did, not under the Clinton administration, nor during the first years of George W. Bush.  Then came 9.11.  Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft flew into New York City in 2003 and announced Lynne’s indictment on the David Letterman show.  The crime?  A novel one.  Conspiracy to provide material aid to a terrorist organization.  What was the material aid?  Her client.  When Ashcroft did that, as the nation’s highest law enforcement officer, he committed an ethical violation for which any other attorney would have been sanctioned.  He made sure that from the very beginning of her ordeal Lynne Stewart never had a chance.  Not with the level of fear the government was able to generate and the scare they put into her jury.

In 2006 she was convicted and sentenced.  The maximum was 30 years, but thanks to the superb legal work of National Lawyers Guild attorneys Elizabeth Fink and Sarah Kunstler and the outpouring of public support Judge Koeltl gave her 28 months.  The government appealed the sentence to their U.S. Court of Appeals.  Game over.  The selective prosecution of Lynne Stewart was accomplished.

Judge John Walker, George W. Bush’s first cousin, sits on that court.  His family made their fortune selling munitions during WWI.  He wrote that the 28 months was “shockingly low.”  Judge Koeltl was given his orders.  The seemingly kindly boyish-looking jurist about whom it was said that he walks to work and looks after an elderly mother — not exactly a sadistic old lady killer — then reversed himself and on the same evidence nearly quadruped the sentence, putting a seventy-year-old grandmother on chemotherapy away for ten years and two years’ probation after that for good measure.  This is much more than meanness.  It is ideology.

Michael Steven Smith is the co-host of the WBAI radio show Law and Disorder and sits on the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights.  See, also, Jean-Claude Paye, “Guantánamo and the New Legal Order” (Monthly Review, May 2005); Jean-Claude Paye, “The End of Habeas Corpus in Great Britain” (Monthly Review, November 2005); Michael E. Tigar, “The Twilight of Personal Liberty: Introduction to ‘A Permanent State of Emergency’” (Monthly Review, November 2006); Jean-Claude Paye, “A Permanent State of Emergency” (Monthly Review, November 2006); Jean-Claude Paye, “Enemy Combatant or Enemy of the Government?” (Monthly Review, September 2007); Michael E. Tigar, “A System of Wholesale Denial of Rights” (Monthly Review, September 2007); Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, “Abu Ghraib and Insaniyat” (Monthly Review, December 2007)

Describing Lynne Stewart, one of this writer’s previous articles said the following:

“She worked selfishly, tirelessly, and heroically for 30 years as a human rights champion, defending America’s poor, underprivileged, and unwanted – people never afforded due process and judicial fairness without an advocate like her. She knew the risks, yet took them courageously until bogusly indicted on April 9, 2002 for:

* “conspiring to defraud the United States;
* conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity;
* providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity; and
* two counts of making false statements.”

A brief timeline was as follows:

* indicted on April 9, 2002;
* on February 10, 2005, convicted on all counts;
* on October, 17, 2006, sentenced to 28 months;
* on November 17, 2009, a US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit three-judge panel upheld the conviction, shamelessly accusing Lynne of “knowingly and willfully making false statements,” redirecting her case to District Court Judge John Koeltl for resentencing, instructing him to consider enhancements for terrorism, perjury, and abuse of her position as a lawyer – an outrageous mandate intimidating Koeltl to comply;
* on November 19, 2009, Stewart jailed at MCC-NY, 150 Park Row, New York, NY; and
* on July 15, 2010, Stewart resentenced to 10 years imprisonment for doing her job honorably, ethically, and admirably with distinction for 30 years.

New York Times writer John Eligon headlined, “Sentence Is Sharply Increased for Lawyer Convicted of Aiding Terror,” saying:

After her sentence, a “collective gasp went up from (her) supporters, who packed the broad, high-ceilinged courtroom….followed by a few shrieks and sobs; some held their hands over their mouths.”

Allowed to speak, Lynne said:

“I’m somewhat stunned, Judge, by the swift change in my outlook. We will continue to struggle on to take all available options to do what we need to do to change this. I feel like I let a lot of my good people down,” after which supporters shouted, “We love you!”

Stewart added:

“Over the last eight months, prison has diminished me. Daily, I confront the prospect of death.”

So does her husband, Ralph Poynter, calling it “a death sentence,” – a shocking miscarriage of justice, symbolizing America’s descent to hell, its moral remnants lost, its democracy a convenient illusion, its despotic reality ruthless, corrupted, brutish and merciless, favoring power over populism under a Constitution political philosopher Sheldon Wolin describes as “conscripted to serve as (its) apprentice rather than its conscience.”

On July 16, New York Law Journal’s Mark Hamblett headlined, “Lynne Stewart Gets a New 10-Year Prison Sentence,” saying:

Koeltl imposed a longer sentence, saying “comments by Stewart in 2006, including a statement in a television interview that she would do ‘it’ again and would not ‘do anything differently’ influenced his decision….indicat(ing) the original sentence ‘was not sufficient’ to reflect the goals of sentencing guidelines.”

Forgotten were Koeltl’s October 2006 comments, calling Lynne’s character “extraordinary,” saying she was “a credit to her profession,” and that a long imprisonment would be “an unreasonable result,” citing “the somewhat atypical nature of her case (and) lack of evidence that any victim was harmed….”

Calling terrorism enhancement “dramatically unreasonable (because it grossly) overstate(d) the seriousness of (her) conduct (and would equate her with) repeat felony offenders for the most serious offenses including murder and drug trafficking.”

He did consider Stewart’s age (70), her health (poor), her distinguished career representing society’s disadvantaged and unwanted, and the unlikelihood she’d commit another “crime.”

“But (he) clearly got the message from the 2nd Circuit,” and complied, his own career perhaps on the line otherwise.
The American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct

Updated in February 2007, its preamble calls for:

* “An independent, fair and impartial judiciary,” calling it “indispensable to our system of justice, (composed of) men and women of integrity;
* Judges should….at all times (ensure) the greatest possible public confidence in their independence, impartiality, integrity, and competence;
* The Model Code….establishes standards (of) ethical conduct, (including) overarching principles of judicial ethics (and fairness), consistent with constitutional requirements, statutes, other court rules, and decisional law, and with due regard for all relevant circumstances;” above all, the truth, not a corrupted prosecutorial version of it, the kind sending innocent people to prison, including society’s best, none better than Lynne.

Mark the date – July 15, 2010, a day of infamy, activist/writer Elaine Brower saying “The Veil is Lifted, The Gloves Are off,” Stewart’s lynching showing America’s true face – cruel, unfair, lawless and debauched, a nation no longer fit to live in.
A Final Note

Jeff Mackler, West Coast Director of the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee, reports she’ll “serve her sentence in Danbury, Connecticut’s minimum security prison….a brilliant and dedicated fighter sacrificed on the altar of an intolerant class-biased system of repression and war.”

A giant among us, she won’t be forgotten, a Supreme Court appeal expected, despite little chance for compassion or judicial fairness, qualities absent in the Roberts court.

http://redguard.tumblr.com/post/790127375/read-red-oscar-grant-juanita-young-fred-hampton-jr

We, the crowd gathered at Judson Memorial Church last night, hadn’t yet heard about the “involuntary manslaughter” wrist-slap verdict in the Jan. 1, 2009 Oakland, Cal. police murder of Oscar Grant. If someone had announced the news, my guess is that we would have ended the event with a march into the streets to protest this latest in the long, endless succession of racist outrages in which killer cops get away with murder.

How can I be so sure? Because the event was a fundraiser/rally for Lynne Stewart, the wonderful, courageous people’s lawyer who is now a political prisoner railroaded into jail for the crime of representing her clients, and it was a rip-roarer. People rose to their feet time after time as speaker after speaker, including more than one who personally knows the reality of racist police violence all too well, spoke truth to power, speaker after speaker calling out their praise of this activist and advocate for justice and struggle.

Human rights attorney Stewart spent her career observing the American Bar Association’s Model Rules, saying all lawyers must:

devote professional time and resources and use civil influence to ensure equal access to our system of justice for all those who because of economic or social barriers cannot afford or secure adequate legal counsel.

Also to practice law ethically, morally and responsibly to assure everyone gets due process and judicial fairness, what the poor, underprivileged, society’s unwanted rarely ever are afforded unless lucky enough to have an advocate like her. What failed her after being bogusly indicted, prosecuted, convicted, and jailed, awaiting final sentencing in July, perhaps later for reasons of health. More on that below.

Stewart (prison number 53504-054) is at:

MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY 10007

Supporters can write her there and send letters about her resentencing to:

Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
350 Broadway
Suite 700
New York, NY 10007

Address them (but don’t send directly) to:

Honorable John G. Koeltl
United States District Judge
Southern District of New York
500 Pearl Street
New York, NY 10007

Stewart’s defense committee will send them to Judge Koeltl, at issue being not to lengthen her 28 month sentence, the Justice Department wanting 30 years, despite her innocence on all charges and lifetime of dedicated service, well known to prosecutors and the judiciary, besides her legion of supporters, this writer proudly among them.

On June 16, posted on lynnestewart.org, the web site maintained for her, husband Ralph Poynter noted the “the deep contradictions of the system,” calling it “an obscenity and an affront to fundamental fairness,” and a threat to all lawyers who defend unpopular clients too vigorously, ones prosecutors target to convict, even those clearly innocent.

“Lynne Stewart deserves justice….equal justice under law,” said Poynter, what everyone deserves but too few get in America’s unjust system, sparing criminal insiders, not easy poor, underprivileged targets, putting a lie to the rule of law and a government of, by and for the people, what it never was and isn’t today under a bipartisan criminal class, headed by a president protecting privilege from beneficial social change.
Targeting A Defender of Human Rights and Judicial Fairness

For issuing a legitimate press release on behalf of her client, Lynne was bogusly charged with:

* “conspiring to defraud the United States;
* conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity;
* providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity; and
* two counts of making false statement.”

On February 10, 2005, she was convicted, appealed, remained free on bond, then ordered incarcerated on November 19, 2009, awaiting resentencing. A full account of her case can be accessed through the following links, the lower one with a section on the Appeals Court ruling:

* Lynne Stewart’s Long Struggle for Justice
* Updating Lynne Stewart’s “Love Struggle”

Lynne’s Health

Jeff Mackler, Stewart Defense Committee West Coast Coordinator, updated her condition, explaining that a regularly scheduled breast cancer check revealed a spot on her liver.

She wanted a biopsy done by her own doctor at her own hospital, (Roosevelt Hospital, New York). Instead it was performed at “a notoriously inferior facility,” taking a week compared to Roosevelt’s same day, more reliable results.

Worse still, except during examination and procedure, she was painfully shackled and handcuffed by order of Obama administration prosecutors, “making rest and sleep virtually impossible.”

Back in MCC prison, her attorneys filed for resentencing postponement, citing health concerns that will impede her ability to participate in her own defense, what she’s able, eager and legally allowed to do.
New York Law Journal on Lynne’s Resentencing

On June 16, Law.com posted Mark Hamblett’s update (Subscription Required), covering DOJ and defense lawyers’ resentencing positions, explained in detailed materials filed.

In their 155-page memorandum, Southern District Assistant US Attorneys Andrew S. Dember and Michael D. Maimin’s accused Stewart of perjuring herself several times, notably when she said a “bubble” protected her attorney status in issuing a press release on her client, what defense counsels routinely do with no recriminations, what perhaps for the time ever, Bush administration prosecutors used against Lynne bogusly and unjustly, Obama administration ones proving just as ruthless.

According to the DOJ memorandum:

“The evidence at trial irrefutably proved that Stewart knew that she was committing perjury by offering such testimony,” arguing for terrorism enhancement to dramatically increase her sentence to the 30 year statutory maximum, or at least far more than 28 months, when, in fact, one day is too much.

In response, defense lawyers Elizabeth M. Fink and Jill R. Shellow called Judge Koeltl’s original sentence “reasonable and just,” despite Stewart’s innocence of all charges – judicial fairness warranting a full exoneration, readmitting her to the bar, and providing compensation for her bogus prosecution and false imprisonment.

Fink and Shellow addressed only her resentencing, calling its lengthening “dramatically unreasonable… overstat(ing) the seriousness” of prosecution charges.

“Moreover, this court’s determination to grant a variance from the guideline sentence based in part on the unreasonable effect of the terrorism enhancement as applied to Stewart was reasonable and proper, and is an approach that has been approved by other courts.”

By Ralph Poynter

In the Spring of 2002, Lynne Stewart was arrested by the FBI, at her home in Brooklyn, for materially aiding terrorism by  virtue of making a public press release to Reuters on behalf of her client, Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman of Egypt. This was done after she had signed a Special Administrative Measure issued by the Bureau of Prisons not permitting her to communicate with the media, on his behalf.

In 2006, a number of attorneys appointed and working pro bono for detainees at Guantanamo were discovered to be acting in a manner that disobeyed a Federal Judge’s protective court order.  The adversary in both cases was the United States Department of Justice.   The results in each case were very different.

In March of 2010, a right wing group “Keep America Safe” led by Lynn Cheyney, hoping to dilute Guantanamo representation and impugn the reputations and careers of the volunteer lawyers, launched a campaign.  Initially they attacked the right of  the detainees to be represented at all.  This was met with a massive denouncement by Press, other media, Civil rights organizations ,and rightly so, as being a threat to the Constitution and particularly the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

A second attack on the Gitmo lawyers was made in the Wall Street Journal of March 16.  This has been totally ignored in the media and by civil and human rights groups. This latter revelation about the violations, by these lawyers, of the Judge’s  protective orders and was revealed via litigation and the Freedom of Information Act.  These pro bono lawyers serving clients assigned to them at Gitmo used privileged attorney client mail to send banned materials.  They carried in news report of US  failures in Afghanistan and Iraq . One lawyer drew a map of the prison.  Another delivered lists to his client of all the suspects held there. They placed on the internet a facsimile of the badges worn by the Guards. Some lawyers “provided news outlets with ‘interviews’ of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organizations.”  When a partner at one of  the large Wall Street law firms sent in multiple copies of an Amnesty International brochure, which her client was to distribute to other prisoners, she was relieved from her representation and barred by the Military Commander from visiting her client.

This case is significant to interpret not because of the right wing line to punish  these lawyers and manipulate their corporate clients to stop patronizing such “wayward” firms. Instead it is significant  because, Lynne Stewart, a left wing progressive lawyer  who had dedicated her thirty year career to defending the poor, the despised, the political prisoner and those ensnared by reason of race, gender, ethnicity, religion , who was dealt with by the same Department of Justice, in such a draconian fashion, confirms our deepest suspicions that she was targeted for prosecution and punishment because of who she is and who she represented so ably and not because of any misdeed.

Let me be very clear, I am not saying that the Gitmo lawyers acted in any “criminal” manner. The great tradition of the defense bar is to be able to make crucial decisions for and with the client without interference by the adversary Government.

I believe that they were acting as zealous attorneys trying to establish rapport and trust with their clients. That said, the moment the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice tried to remove Julia Tarver Mason from her client, the playing field tilted.  Ms Tarver Mason was not led out of her home in handcuffs to the full glare of publicity.  There was no press conference.  The Attorney General did not go on the David Letterman show to gloat about the latest strike in the War on Terror, the purge of the Gitmo lawyer…NO.

Instead an “armada” of corporate lawyers went to Court against the Government. They, in the terms of the litigation trade,  papered the US  District Courthouse in Washington D.C.  They brought to bear the full force of their Money and Power– derived from the corporate world–and in 2006 “settled” the case with the government, restoring their clients to Guantanamo without any punishment at all, not to say any Indictment.  Lynne Stewart, without corporate connections and coming from a working class background, was tried and convicted for  issuing, on behalf of her client, a public press release to Reuters.  There was no injury, no harm, no attacks, no deaths.

Yet that same Department of Justice that dealt so favorably and capitulated to the Gitmo corporate lawyers, wants to sentence  Lynne Stewart to thirty (30) YEARS in prison.  It is the equivalent of asking for a death sentence since she is 70 years old.

This vast disparity in treatment between Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers reveals the deep contradictions of the system —  those who derive power from rich and potent corporations, those whose day to day work maintains and increases that power–are treated differently.  Is it because the Corporate Power is intertwined with Government Power???

Lynne Stewart deserves Justice…  equal justice under law.  Her present sentence of 28 months incarceration (she is in Federal Prison) should at least be maintained, if not made equal to the punishment that was meted out to the Gitmo lawyers.  The thirty year sentence, assiduously pursued by DOJ under both Bush and Obama, is an obscenity and an affront to fundamental fairness.  They wanted to make her career and dedication to individual clients, a warning, to the defense bar that the Government can arrest any lawyer on any pretext.  The sharp contrasts between  the cases of Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers just confirm that she is getting a raw deal–one that should be protested actively, visibly and with the full force of our  righteous resistance.

Lynne Stewart will be re sentenced sometime in July, in NYC.

Ralph.Poynter@yahoo.com