Padilla torture claim reaches the Court

SCOTUSBlog

Lyle Denniston

The highest-profile U.S. citizen taken captive as a suspected terrorist — Jose Padilla — returned to the Supreme Court on Monday, in a bid to get the federal courts to review the government’s power to wage its “war on terrorism” through prolonged detention inside the U.S., under harsh conditions and without criminal charges.  Joined by his mother, Estela Lebron, Padilla asked the Court to decide one issue: may federal officials be sued for damages “for the torture of an American citizen on American soil.”  (A docket number has not yet been assigned to Lebron, et al., v. Rumsfeld, et al.)

The petition is a challenge to a ruling in January by the Fourth Circuit Court, declaring that the U.S. military policies of detention and interrogation cannot be challenged in a claim for damages in federal court.  (A post on this blog discussing the Circuit Court ruling can be read here.)  The new petition is here.

The outcome of the case may also affect Padilla’s attempt to hold a former high-ranking Justice Department official, John Yoo, legally accountable for what happened to Padilla in captivity — a case still awaiting a ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court (Padilla, et al., v. Yoo, Circuit docket 09-16478).  In one of several rounds of new briefing ordered in that case, the two sides were told to comment on the impact there of the Fourth Circuit ruling that Padilla is now contesting in his new petition.

Detainees held by the U.S. military as terrorism suspects do have a constitutional right, under the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush, to test in a habeas court whether the government has any power to detain them, even if they are not citizens.  But that option — one that has seldom worked for detainees in general, and did not work for Padilla — does not include any inquiry into claims of torture or other human rights abuses during captivity.  Still, the Fourth Circuit ruled that the habeas option is the only legal recourse for a wartime detainee, even one who is a U.S. citizen.

Claims of torture have not fared well in most lower courts or in the Supreme Court, and the Justices have yet to rule directly on any such claim arising out of government policies that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.   Those policies, begun under President George W. Bush, have been continued, with some changes, by the Obama Administration.  In most such cases, the Justices have simply denied review or barred such a lawsuit either on procedural grounds or out of fear of intrusion into national security.

Ruling: No Court Can Hear Abuse and Wrongful Death Claims from Guantanamo

Center for Constitutional Rights

February 17, 2010, New York – Yesterday evening, the district court in Washington, D.C. ruled against two men who died in Guantanamo in June 2006 and their families in a case seeking to hold federal officials and the United States responsible for the men’s torture, arbitrary detention and ultimate deaths at Guantánamo.

Following a two-year investigation, the military concluded that the men had committed suicide. Recent first-hand accounts by four soldiers stationed at the base at the time of the deaths, however, raise serious questions about the cause and circumstances of the deaths, including the possibility that the men died as the result of torture.

In dismissing the case, the district court ruled that the deceased’s constitutional claims that it was a violation of due process and cruel treatment to detain them for four years without charge while subjecting them to inhumane and degrading conditions of confinement and violent acts of torture and abuse, could not be heard in federal court. The men were held on the basis of an “enemy combatant” finding by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal later found by the Supreme Court itself to be inadequate.

The district court held that the claims were barred by a jurisdiction-stripping provision of the 2006 Military Commissions Act that bars any challenge by a Guantánamo detainee to their treatment, conditions, or any other aspect of their detention, while failing to address the plaintiffs’ arguments about the unconstitutionality of the provision itself. The court also dismissed the deceased’s claims under the Alien Tort Claims Act, following a holding by the D.C. Circuit Court in another detainee case that found that even torture or seriously criminal conduct can fall within the proper “scope of employment” of a government actor. Last, the court failed to consider the merits of plaintiffs’ claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act, including for emotional distress by the families, by holding that the U.S. military base at Guantánamo is still a “foreign country” for the purposes of the Act.

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