Salon.com > National Lawyers Guild

Nato 3 seek dismissal of terror charges

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:52:00 +0000

The "Nato 3," three young men arrested in Chicago ahead of the 2012 NATO summit, are asking an Illinois judge to drop their terror charges. The three activists, who have been held without bail since last May, face charges under a never-before-used Illinois anti-terrorism statute put in place after 9/11.

According to CBS local news, the defendants' lawyer, Michael Deutsch of the National Lawyers Guild, filed a motion to have the charges dismissed. He said that state law ought to be thrown out, arguing that the statute is ill-defined and open to politically motivated prosecutions:

"The statute says terrorism is an intent to intimidate or coerce a significant portion of the civilian population, and what we have alleged is those words coerce or intimidate – without any act of violence – is unconstitutionally vague, which allows for the punishment of First Amendment activity,” he said. “What does it mean to intimidate a significant portion of the civilian population? What is a significant portion, and what is meant by civilian population? All those vague undefined terms allow for the police and the prosecutors to pick and choose who to charge with the most serious prejudicial charges of terrorism."

Occupy fights the law: Will the law win?

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000

The Occupy movement is an exercise in the workings of power whether it is social, financial, policing or political. The occupations that began in September spread with an infectious passion in part because the police violence and mass arrests, the tried-and-true methods of state power employed to suppress radical movements, backfired and the movement grew more. By October hundreds of encampments had popped up nationwide with the tacit cooperation and sometimes explicit approval of local officials. For a few heady weeks Occupy Wall Street had the glow of popular legitimacy – social power – trumping whatever fusty laws prohibited camping or a continuous presence in a public space.

The inevitable counteroffensive was launched in November. Using the mass media, politicians hyped the movements as imminent threats to public health and safety, justifying aggressive evictions of prominent occupations in Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore., and New York City. Within weeks other major encampments in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and New Orleans were scattered with hundreds of arrests. A third wave of closures has been underway since late January with occupations shut down from Hawaii to Miami and Austin, Texas, to Buffalo, N.Y.