federal courts

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that one reason he decided to try the five suspected 9/11 co-conspirators in federal court is because that was where he would most likely be able to win a conviction. As he said later in the hearing: “Failure is not an option. These [...]

On his MSNBC morning show today, Dylan Ratigan asked me if I thought the decision to bring the suspected 9/11 co-conspirators to trial in a New York federal court was an attempt to “deboogeymanificate” those notorious terrorists we’ve heard so much about. After all, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged al-Qaeda co-plotters have often been [...]

There’s growing attention today to the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans planning to filibuster the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and to the Obama administration’s failure to make judicial nominations a higher priority.
NPR’s Nina Totenberg this morning had an excellent roundup on the issue, while The New York Times, [...]

Eight months ago, President Obama nominated Indiana judge David Hamilton for a seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. As Jeffrey Toobin reported, it was an uncontroversial, Republican-backed choice intended to “begin a profound and rapid change in the confirmation process and in the federal judiciary itself.”
Eight months later, Republicans are still filibustering Hamilton, [...]

Even though the military justice system hasn’t actually executed anyone in over 50 years, military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty in the case of alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, The Wall Street Journal reports this morning. Hasan was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder on Thursday. That’s not [...]

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) kicked off the annual Federalist Society convention today with a call to oppose President Obama’s liberal nominees for the federal judiciary, Legal Times reports.
“We are in a long and difficult fight,” Sessions told the gathering of leading conservative lawyers, judges and law professors from around the country. Sessions was referring to [...]

Praising an Italian court’s recent ruling that CIA agents broke the law in an extraordinary rendition case, The New York Times today highlights a growing phenomenon that hasn’t received sufficient attention: European courts appear more willing than their American counterparts to enforce the laws protecting basic human and civil rights.

A “new form of obstructionism” by Republicans in the Senate is delaying confirmation of Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships, writes Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, in Slate today.
With only three of 22 judicial nominees confirmed so far, it “seems clear that Senate Republicans are prepared to take the partisan war over the [...]

The possibility prompts fervent opposition from Republicans, who say the 9/11 terrorists should never be allowed anywhere on U.S. soil, let alone in a civilian U.S. court.

Human Rights First has just released a new report updating its previous study of criminal terrorism cases prosecuted since the early 1990s. Once again, it concludes that the federal courts are fully capable of prosecuting complex and sensitive cases of international terrorism.
The organization’s previous report, issued last year, was written by two former federal prosecutors [...]