Boumediene v. Bush - the United States Supreme Court holds that Gitmo detainees have rights after all
Today the USSCT released Boumadiene v. Bush, holding that the detainees at Guantanamo have a constitutional right to habeas relief, and strikes down as unconstitutional several provisions of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The Court also holds that Congress can take the right of habeas away from detainees by suspending the writ of habeas under the Suspension Clause.
Justice Kennedy, in the majority opinion, talks about the history of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 and its relevance today. He notes that the officials charged with our nation's every day security may feel that the history of the Habeas Corpus Act is not relevant, and that security is dependent on the military's ability to act upon intelligence. He goes on to say:
Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers. It is from these principles that the judicial authority to consider petitions for habeas corpus relief derives.
Justice Scalia, in his dissent, accuses the Court of causing Americans to be killed:
The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic.
I can only assume from this statement that Scalia does not feel that the right to habeas corpus is a "time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic."
Benjamin Franklin said, “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
If the men and women of our military are dying now to protect our freedoms in this great nation, then we need to honor those sacrifices by not doing away with those very freedoms that they are dying to protect. The U.S. Supreme Court took a brave step today to preserve those freedoms against those in our government who would just as soon take them away in the name of National Security.
More commentary:
volokh, volokh, volokh
Gideon, Gideon
sentencing law blog
scotusblog
