In 2009, around the time Jawad's lawyers filed for a writ of Habeas corpus in the name of their client, Gottfried decided to move forward with the bill. Despite what at the time seemed like a promising future, the legislation failed to pass and hasn't even been discussed in the House's floor, even though it has been proposed in each of the last three years.

"To some extent, the issue is put in very blunt terms, 'Whose side are you on? The terrorists' or Gottfried's?" Gottfried said last winter, a couple of months before the legislation officially died once again.

Mohammed Jawad was captured by Afghan security forces in a crowded Kabul bazaar on December 17, 2002. He was picked up, along with several other individuals who were later released, after a grenade thrown inside a car nearly killed two American Special Forces soldiers and their Afghan translator. In the local police station, Jawad was accused of throwing the grenade and coerced into confessing, according to David Frakt, a member of the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps who was assigned to lead Jawad's defense in 2008.

Jawad at first denied participating in the attack, but the police threatened to kill him or his family if he did not accept the charges against him, Frakt said. The threats, later accepted as a form of torture under the Military Commission Rule of Evidence , were issued in front of high-government Afghan officials whose names were redacted from court documents. Jawad, at the time nearly illiterate and apparently under the effect of some kind of drug, signed with his fingerprint a confession written in Dari -- a language he does not speak -- in which he took full responsibility for the assault and expressed pride about it, stating that he would have done it again if he had the chance.

At around 10 p.m., U.S. security personnel took Jawad into custody and led him to Forward Operating Base 195, also known as the Kabul Military Academy. There, he was strip-searched and photographed naked. Once again, after denying having anything to do with the grenade attack, Jawad was coerced into confessing that he played a leading role, according to court documents . His account in front of U.S. interrogators, however, was fairly different from the one he had given to the Afghan police. He told them he had been drugged and initially denied having any involvement in the incident (he later confessed, according to military interrogators , and, allegedly, his confession was recorded in a missing videotape, which was never found despite a "service-wide inquiry" from a government prosecutor).

Jawad was transferred to the Bagram Theater Internment Facility on December 18, just a couple of weeks after severe beatings caused the death of two detainees in the prison. Records from interrogators and files that have been partially declassified state that, while he was there, he was hooded, placed in stress positions, thrown down a flight of stairs, kneed, kicked, sleep-deprived and threatened with being handed over to the Taliban. Military interrogators, who by that time had realized Jawad was a juvenile (he does not know when he was born; his age at the time of capture ranges from 15-17, depending on the account), played on his fears and on his constant cries for his mother to secure more statements.