Padilla case: President cannot detain U.S. citizen, seized on U.S. soil, as enemy combatant

2nd Circuit relied on arguments in LCHR brief

New York -- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held today that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must release U.S. citizen Jose Padilla from military custody within 30 days. The Court held that the executive branch does not have the constitutional or statutory authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens seized on American soil.

“After the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, we learned our lesson as a nation,” said Deborah Pearlstein, who directs the Lawyers Committee’s U.S. Law and Security Program. “Congress passed a law saying that ‘no citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress.’ The court’s decision today makes clear that Congress meant what it said. And the President is not above that law.”

Mr. Padilla was arrested by civilian authorities at Chicago O’Hare Airport in May 2002 and initially held in New York as a material witness in the government’s ongoing counterterrorism investigation. In June 2002, the president abruptly designated him an “enemy combatant,” and he was removed from his New York prison cell to a military brig in South Carolina. He has been held in that brig ever since, barred from asserting his innocence or from communicating with his lawyers or the outside world in any way.

Denied all access to their client, Mr. Padilla’s lawyers pursued a habeas corpus petition on his behalf—in a case that raised fundamental questions about the power of the executive branch to unilaterally exile a U.S. citizen from the protections of the Constitution by labeling him (without visible standards) as an “enemy combatant.”

“This decision is a victory for the Constitution,” said Pearlstein.

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights coordinated three "friend of the court" or amicus briefs in the case.

Relying on arguments advanced in a “friend of the court” brief written by the Lawyers Committee, the Second Circuit concluded that Mr. Padilla’s detention not only falls outside the President’s inherent powers as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, but also violates a statute that expressly forbids the executive from detaining a U.S. citizen absent specific congressional authorization.

The Second Circuit agreed that there was no such authorization in this case. The "friend of the court" brief was written by the Lawyers Committee and signed by a bipartisan coalition of organizations: the Cato Institute; the Center for National Security Studies; the Constitution Project; the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights; People for the American Way Foundation; and the Rutherford Institute.