Federal judge rules no-fly list unconstitutional

News

Federal judge rules no-fly list unconstitutional

June 26, 2014 08:09:17 am

[JURIST] A judge for the US District Court for the District of Oregon [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Tuesday that the government’s practice of adding people to a no-fly list is unconstitutional. US District Judge Anna Brown ruled that the list, which bans people from commercial flights due to alleged links to terrorism, violates a person’s constitutional rights because it gives them no way to contest the decision. The judge ordered the government to develop new methods that allow people who are put on the no-fly list to contest that designation. The original lawsuit was brought on behalf of 13 Americans who were put on the list without notice or a way of removing themselves. In a statement [press release] following Tuesday’s decision the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [advocacy website] declared it a “landmark ruling.” ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi, one of the attorneys who argued the case, stated:

For years, in the name of national security the government has argued for blanket secrecy and judicial deference to its profoundly unfair No Fly List procedures, and those arguments have now been resoundingly rejected by the court… Our clients will finally get the due process to which they are entitled under the Constitution. This excellent decision also benefits other people wrongly stuck on the No Fly List, with the promise of a way out from a Kafkaesque bureaucracy causing them no end of grief and hardship. We hope this serves as a wake-up call for the government to fix its broken watchlist system, which has swept up so many innocent people.

Government lawyers are reviewing the decision and have not said whether they plan to appeal.

The no-fly list was created by the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a branch of the FBI [official websites], in 2003. The TSC was established by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6 [text] which, “directed that a center be established to consolidate the government’s approach to terrorism screening and to provide for the appropriate and lawful use of terrorist information in screening processes.” In 2012 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated [JURIST report] a challenge brought by the ACLU over the no-fly list maintained by the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA). The Ninth Circuit ruled in 2008 that those placed on the government’s no-fly list can challenge their inclusion on the list [JURIST report] in federal district courts. The court held that the TSC, which actually maintains the list, is a subsection of the FBI and is therefore subject to review by the district courts.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.