A U.S. District Court ruling that said parts of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional is generating responses from all sides of the debate.
The ruling issued last Wednesday from U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken said parts of the anti- terrorism act violate the Fourth Amendment because they allow secret wiretapping and searches without showing probable cause.
The case came from a lawsuit filed by Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield who had been detained as a suspected terrorist involved in the Madrid bombing in 2004. The FBI falsely interpreted a fingerprint and attributed it to Mayfield. He later received an apology and a $2 million settlement but retained his right to challenge the legality of parts of the act that had been used against him.
University law professor Garrett Epps said he thinks the likely appeal from the government will focus on whether Mayfield had a standing right to sue, but “the decision on the Fourth Amendment issues was pretty sound.”
Nikolas Antovich, vice president of the College Republicans and a columnist for the Emerald, said he accepts the courts ruling because he knows there will be appeals.
“The law is fine and legal as far as I’m concerned,” he said. Antovich said the law, originally passed with bipartisan support in 2001, has withstood “major congressional oversight and judicial challenges.”
Hope Marston, a local organizer for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, said she was happy with the ruling but that there is still more work to be done.
“It’s great to have a federal judge to decide that parts of the Patriot Act are unconstitutional,” she said.
She said every time a judge overturns an administration policy dealing with anything from wiretapping to habeas corpus rights for detainees “they affirm what we’ve already known and we’ve been working for.”
Her group has been working virtually since the Patriot Act passed to inform citizens of its effect. They also got the Eugene City Council and the Lane County Board of Commissioners to pass resolutions in defense of civil liberties and in opposition to the act.
Marston said she thinks the appeal will go well in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is widely regarded as a liberal circuit, but she is not as confident about the chance the Mayfield case will have should it go all the way to the Supreme Court.
“Bush has gotten a couple of real nasty guys in there who will do whatever he wants,” she said.
But Epps said Aiken’s ruling shouldn’t be interpreted as the opinion of a liberal judge. Aiken is a University alumnus and an appointee of President Bill Clinton.
“I don’t know to what extent the Bush spin machine has gotten to work,” on painting Aiken as a liberal or activist judge, Epps said, but “that’s really actually quite wrong.”
He said the challenges to a variety of surveillance tactics used by the administration have been overturned by “a wide spectrum of judges.”
“They’re not just flagrant violations of the constitution,” Epps said of the Patriot Act and other tactics used to catch terrorists. “The problem is they (the administration) have no credibility. They have been so extreme in their positions on presidential power that judges don’t take them seriously.”
Epps pointed to Aiken’s recent ruling against “so-called eco-terrorists” as an example of her jurisprudence. “Any attempt to portray this as a rogue judge is terribly displaced. She reacted like a federal judge,” he said.
Marston said it may take awhile for the case to get to the Supreme Court, but there is a lot students can do now to protect civil liberties.
“I know UO students are ripe for organizing around these issues,” she said. “It’s going to take a long time to restore our rights.”
For more information about the Lane County Bill of Rights Defense Committee, e-mail [email protected]. For more information about College Republicans e-mail [email protected].