May she rot forever in a dank dungeon cell for her facilitation of terrorist actions.

The First Amendment provides no refuge for a civil rights lawyer who said she was unfairly convicted of providing material support to terrorists for publicly releasing the message of a notorious jailed terrorist, a federal judge said yesterday.

In a 54-page ruling that recounted key trial evidence, U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl rejected all of attorney Lynne Stewart's arguments that the Feb. 10 verdict should be tossed out.

Stewart, 65, had argued that her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, was engaging in protected speech when he expressed his opinion about a cease fire by Islamic militants in Egypt that Stewart passed along in a 2000 press release.

Koeltl said the fact that the sheik participated in a conspiracy to kill people in a foreign country by communicating words from the prison where he is serving a life sentence did not make his participation constitutionally protected.

"The First Amendment lends no protection to participation in a conspiracy, even if such participation is through speech," he said.

Koeltl cited an earlier ruling Chief Judge Michael Mukasey made on the same issue in 1994 when Mukasey wrote that speech "is not protected by the First Amendment when it is the very vehicle of the crime itself."

In short, you cannot be the messenger for terrorists and then wrap yourself in the First Amendment.

Posted by: Greg at 01:56 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 243 words, total size 2 kb.