This text was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Middle on Disaster Reporting.WASHINGTON — A number one protection lawyer who focuses on dyi
This text was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Middle on Disaster Reporting.
WASHINGTON — A number one protection lawyer who focuses on dying penalty instances has been chosen to characterize one of many 5 males accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults earlier than a army tribunal at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, overcoming a key impediment to the warfare crimes trial.
However the nationwide disaster over the coronavirus pandemic and the sudden, current resignation of the army decide overseeing the trial nonetheless stay as hurdles to shifting forward within the advanced conspiracy case.
The lawyer, David I. Bruck, will characterize Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni accused of organizing a cell of males primarily based in Hamburg, Germany, who have been among the many 19 hijackers who seized 4 passenger planes and slammed them into the World Commerce Middle, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania subject. Almost 3,000 folks have been killed within the assaults.
Mr. Bruck has dealt with a number of high-profile dying penalty instances, together with representing Dylann S. Roof, who killed 9 black churchgoers in South Carolina in June 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of many brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; and Susan Smith, a girl in South Carolina who drowned her two younger sons in 1994. Mr. Roof and Mr. Tsarnaev are on federal dying row.
Mr. Bruck, who has by no means been to the Navy base at Guantánamo Bay or practiced regulation in a army courtroom, has not but met or spoken with Mr. bin al-Shibh, essentially the most unstable of the defendants within the capital case whose lead defendant is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Mr. bin al-Shibh is held at a maximum-security prison called Camp 7, which does not permit lawyers to speak with the prisoners they represent by videolink or telephone.
The chief defense counsel for military commissions, Brig. Gen. John G. Baker, said he chose Mr. Bruck on Monday to succeed James P. Harrington, who had represented Mr. bin al-Shibh since arraignment in May 2012 and is leaving the case for health reasons.
By law, each defendant charged in a death penalty case at the Guantánamo military commissions is entitled to a qualified capital defense lawyer, known as a learned counsel. The next step is for the overseer of the Office of Military Commissions, Christian L. Reismeier, a retired rear admiral, to formally hire Mr. Bruck as a contractor at the federal rate of $195 an hour.
Colleagues describe Mr. Bruck, 70, as courtly and soft-spoken as well as a good listener.
Robert Dunham, the executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, called him “one of the pioneering capital defense lawyers of the modern era.”
Mr. Bruck has been defending capital cases at trial since 1980. He helped expand the body of information a sentencing jury can consider at death penalty trials through Supreme Court cases. And he has trained new generations of capital defenders, and helped legal teams that have insufficient resources through his legal clinic at the Washington and Lee law school in Virginia and as a founding member of the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel.
In February, Mr. Harrington, 75, citing health problems, obtained permission to leave the case from the judge, Col. W. Shane Cohen.
Then last month, Colonel Cohen said he would retire from the Air Force for “the best interests of my family.” He leaves the case on April 24. No successor has been chosen.
The departure of Colonel Cohen leaves unresolved the question of whether Mr. bin al-Shibh should be tried separately at a later date because of the considerable time it will take his new lawyer to prepare.
General Baker noted that although Mr. Bruck had agreed to represent Mr. bin al-Shibh, Mr. Bruck will need “significant time to catch up with seven years’ worth of litigation.” He cited hundreds of legal motions, tens of thousands of pages of hearing transcripts and hundreds of thousands of pages of potential trial evidence.
Among capital defense lawyers, Mr. Bruck is widely known for arguing Skipper v. South Carolina before the Supreme Court in 1986. The landmark ruling said that evidence of a convict’s behavior in jail after capture and potential for future dangerousness, based on testimony from mental health experts and prison guards, are relevant to a judge or jury deciding whether to sentence a convict to death.
Lawyers for some of the defendants in the Sept. 11 trial have said the prisoners were so damaged by torture in C.I.A. detention in the years before their transfer to Guantánamo in 2006 that they would not be a threat to anybody should they be imprisoned for life.
The judge initially set a trial date of January 2021 but postponed the start because the coronavirus has forced the Defense Department to prohibit most travel and office work. The next pretrial hearings are scheduled for late July, after Ramadan.