Pirate's Cove

Here we go again. The Grey Lady is making the assertion that it is somehow OK for lawyers of criminals to help their clients in criminal activity (reg. required)

The conviction of Lynne F. Stewart for providing material aid to
terrorism and for lying to the government is another perverse victory
in the Justice Department’s assault on the Constitution.

Ms.
Stewart, the lawyer who was convicted last week of five felonies, will
be disbarred and faces up to 30 years in jail. She represented Sheikh
Omar Abdel Rahman, not exactly a sympathetic character. He is the
leader of the Islamic Group, a terrorist organization that plotted the
assassination of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and masterminded the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

He was sentenced in 1996 to life in prison. When Ms. Stewart sought
to visit her client in jail, prison officials required her to sign an
affirmation that she would abide by special rules requiring that she
communicate with the sheikh only about legal matters. The rules also
forbade her from passing messages to third parties, like the news
media. Yet the jury found that Ms. Stewart frequently made gibberish
comments in English to distract prison officials who were trying to
record the conversation between the sheikh and his interpreter, and
that she "smuggled" messages from her jailed client to his followers.

But
if the federal government had followed the law, Ms. Stewart would never
have been required to agree to these rules to begin with. Just after
9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft gave himself the power to bypass
the lawyer-client privilege, which every court in the United States has
upheld, and eavesdrop on conversations between prisoners and their
lawyers if he had reason to believe they were being used to "further
facilitate acts of violence or terrorism." The regulation became
effective immediately.

Interesting. Blame Ashcroft. Standard. Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn’t it always been illegal to help a convicted criminal engage in illegal activities, as well as against the Bar? This is nothing new. We are not talking about a lawyer hearing about illegal conduct with their client. Lynne Stewart was actively helping her client in illegal activity. I guess this is OK at the liberal New York Times, since taking this stance is anti-Bush. Yet, are we supposed to accept the proposition that it is peachy keen for attorneys to actively involve themselves in criminal conduct? No. Nor is it ok for attorneys to actively participate in activities that harm the United States.

Update: Captain Ed has a post regarding George Soros partially funding Stewart’s legal defense.

His support of a convicted terrorist enabler, however, may well wind up
making his largesse more of a liability than an asset for a political
party already seen as fatally soft on terror. How will Howard Dean make
the case to the American people that the Democrats can keep the country
safe when his majority stockholder fights to keep terrorists and their
messengers out of prison and on television, giving orders out to the
lunatics via talk-show interviews? Will Hillary be able to keep Soros
out of her pocketbook for the Senate run in 2006, let alone 2008?
George Soros just handed the GOP a big stick with which to beat the
Democrats, and inadvertently gave Steven Minarik some undeserved
political cover.