The extraordinary Lynne Stewart

Scan page 8

Memorial meetings for Lynne Stewart took place in New York City on April 22, and in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 5-6. P Two incidents serve to highlight her extraordinary eoples’ attorney Lynne Stewart died on March 12. life in the service of humanity.

Charged with “conspiracy to aid and abet terror­ ism,” Lynne took the witness stand in early 2005 at the close of her nine-month frame-up trial presided over by Federal District Court Judge John Koeltl in New York City. Stewart was asked by her attorney, Michael Tigar, why she had issued a press release on behalf of her client, the “blind” Sheik and Egyptian cleric, Omar Abdel Rahman, when she knew that do­ ing so was a violation of a Special Administrative Or­ der (SAM) that prohibited Rahman from engaging in contact with anyone, anywhere, other than his attor­ neys. Rahman had been falsely convicted in 1995 of participating in a New York City terrorist conspiracy and was serving a life-sentence in Rochester, Minn.

The answer to that question stood at the core of her case. “Why not just appeal the SAM’s restrictions to a higher court?” Tigar continued. The remainder of her life in prison rested on Lynne’s answer.

The jury, 12 New Yorkers, sequestered during a tri­ al in the same courtroom where in 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to execution at the height of the McCarthy era, listened more than intently. The stakes were high. The prosecution was demanding a 30-year jail sentence.

Lynne’s sensational trial had all the earmarks of a government preparing to shred whatever semblance of fair play remained in the criminal “justice” sys­ tem—all in the name of its “war on terrorism.” To put an attorney in jail for diligently representing her cli­ ent was close to unprecedented—“a chill on the bar,” significant parts of the legal profession proclaimed.

The obliging Judge Koeltl, undoubtedly aware that government prosecutors aimed to directly link Lynne to terrorism, by hook or by crook, allowed the horror of the Sept. 11, 2001, Twin Towers terrorist bomb­ ings to enter and pervade his courtroom. He chose to base his heinous decision on the findings of an FBI search of Lynne’s law offices, where photos of Osa­ ma Bin Laden and other terrorists around the world were found. The judge disregarded the fact that all the photos and related files on worldwide terrorist activities belonged to one of Lynne’s co-defendants, her professional Arabic translator, Mohamed Yousry, whose NYU Ph.D. thesis and associated research on terrorism had been approved by his faculty adviser.

Attorney Michael Tigar objected to the introduc­ tion of this material as hearsay—that is, as having no connection to Lynne or to the case at hand. In U.S. law the introduction of hearsay “evidence” is virtu­ ally banned. But Tigar’s motion was essentially cir­ cumvented by Koeltl with a deadly twist. He agreed that the material was hearsay and instructed the jury that it was not to be considered as fact or having any relation to the charges against Stewart. Yet he nev­ 8 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2017 ertheless allowed its introduction, as he explained, to“enable the jury to learn about the mind of the de­ fendant.” I will never forget Koeltl’s vicious and du­ plicitous words.

His decision squared with the prosecution’s objec­ tive to link Stewart and her two co-defendants to ter­ rorist activities everywhere. Delighted, the terrorist show trial was on as prosecutors proceeded to flood the walls of the courtroom, replete with giant and multiple theater-sized screens, with photos of terror­ ist activities—all aimed at associating Lynne with the government’s conception of an ongoing “worldwide terrorist conspiracy.”

In the end, some 90 percent or more of Lynne’s ninemonth trial focused on this hearsay evidence, while the prosecution presented just a single witness to state that he had issued the SAM to Lynne. Not a single wit­ ness testified that Lynne had any connection to terror­ ist activities.

Thus, Lynne’s answer to the question as to why she didn’t appeal this SAM to a higher court was crucial to her life itself. She might have argued that the SAM itself was ambiguous, that in the normal course of events when an attorney violates a SAM they are rep­ rimanded or punished by being denied contact with their client for three months, and/or required to sign a new SAM.

I paraphrase Lynne’s remarks as I remember them in that rapt courtroom. I was astonished when she stated, “I have a friend in prison, Mumia Abu-Jamal. He filed a lawsuit to prevent his prosecutors from opening his mail, including from his attorneys.” Lynne continued, “Mumia Abu-Jamal won that suit but it took him some five years. My duty to my client required that under such circumstances, we not wait five years with regard to a harmless press release.”

Here was Lynne, at her personal, uninhibited, spon­ taneous best and craziest. With her life on the line she decided to bring the case of a dear friend and a convicted world-renowned “cop-killer,” Mumia Abu-Jamal, to the attention of the New York jury. No seri­ ous attorney would have recommended it. But Lynne, cut from another cloth, believed that Mumia’s case needed to be once again brought to public attention.

Her remarks were not scripted, not carefully pre­ sented to evoke sympathy, not offered to mitigate her SAM violation, but only to tell the jury, and the world, who she was—a human being who stood by Mumia to the end. This single incident tells us precisely what Lynne’s life and record as a people’s lawyer for the poor and oppressed was all about.

The final question asked to Lynne by her attorney was the clincher. “Lynne,” said Tigar, “if you had to do it all over again, would you have issued that press re­ lease?” I was within some 15 feet of Lynne and hold­ ing my breath for her answer. Lynne, once again, had a choice, the easy road of contrition, apology, and a plea for forgiveness, or the road to hell—in Lynne’s mind to socialist heaven—paved only with Lynne’s life-long humanistic and loving intentions and faith that she could penetrate the hearts and minds of the jury.

She responded, as her eyes welled up with tears. “I would hope,” she began and then paused. “I would hope that I had the courage to do it again.” She paused again, unable to speak— momentarily overcome by her emotions. She continued, “I would do it again!”

No apologies from Lynne Stewart. No legal or self-serving pleas to the jury that she had a made a mistake and should have taken the SAM to the courts. Lynne’s response evoked the passion of a movement fighter, of a champion of all that is beautiful in the human soul. Needless to say, Lynne present­ ed her persecutors and the jury with all the “facts” they needed. She was convicted. Five years after her 2005 “terrorist con­ spiracy” conviction, when I headed Lynne’s defense committee on the West Coast, Lynne was cruelly sentenced to 10 years in a Texas prison, after vindictive federal pros­ ecutors appealed the Federal Court judge’s sentence of some 30 months.

After serving three years in prison, the United National Antiwar Coalition and all of Lynne’s supporters mounted a great cam­ paign that won the support of 70,000 social activists across the country. Lynne, cancer ridden, was finally granted “compassionate release” following her prison doctors’ diag­ nosis that she had less then a year to live. Lynne beat the odds and spent almost three years in freedom, continuing her lifelong commitment to defending all those victims of capitalist injustice.

Lynne was among Mumia Abu-Jamal’s most ardent supporters. Her court cases included some of the seminal Weatherman contests in the 1970s as well as an amazing victory on behalf of Larry Davis, who defended himself against a multiple cop-shooting invasion of his house, when a number of the shootfirst police were killed. Notwithstanding Davis’s drug-dealing record, his victory was hailed from the windows and rooftops of Harlem’s Black community, where wanton police murder of the innocent is the rule, not the exception. Only the most oppressed can fully understand the dimensions of the Larry Davis court victory. Lynne did too, a rare exception.

Pilloried by the corporate media, who mocked her every success in the rigged criminal “justice” system, Lynne never bent to her accusers’ contempt for an at­ torney who stood up for those on the other side of the class line, as Lynne aptly described it, no matter how unpopular her client.

Ralph Poynter, Lynne’s husband and partner, was a fighter for the oppressed in his own right. The two were inseparable. Lynne was always surrounded by family and loved ones, with children from her first marriage, and Ralph’s too, as well as kids they had to­ gether, and grandkids—all filled with admiration for Grandma Lynne, all the recipient of Lynne’s warmth, dedication, mindfulness and love.

Lynne was fond of saying, including to The New York Times reporter who interviewed her at her home a few weeks before her death, that she had no intention of leaving this earth quietly. Quoting Dylan Thomas, she told The Times, whose reporter followed on the next day with a contemptuous hate piece reflecting his corporate masters’ ire for everything wonderful in Lynne life and struggles, that she had no intention of “going gently into that good night.”

That was Lynne’s credo, her detractors notwith­ standing. Always with the words of poet Dylan Thom­ as in mind, Lynne insisted:

“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

And she did, until her longstanding breast cancer had spread throughout her body, including her brain. Ralph explained a few days before Lynne’s passing on March 12 that her days were numbered, after two strokes rendered her in a near coma. But he told me that Lynne was still able to muster a faint smile as I challenged her to yet another dance in the months ahead and to continue debating our movement dif­ ferences on this or that question that often found us in delightful exchanges over the years.

Donations to Lynne’s final family expenses can be sent to: Lynne Stewart Organization, 1070 Dean St., Brooklyn, NY 11216, 1st floor. (Make checks payable to Lynne Stewart Org.) n Jeff Mackler is the past West Coast Coordinator of the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee.