In 5-4 ruling, Supreme Court extends habeas rights to detainees

The Bush administration keeps insisting it can ignore the law when it comes to detainees at Guantanamo Bay. And the Supreme Court keeps saying the Bush administration is wrong.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts. In its third rebuke of the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The court’s liberal justices were in the majority. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

The five-justice majority included Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens. Predictably, the minority was made of the four-vote conservative bloc: Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia. (I mention this in part because a McCain administration would tilt the high court in the other direction, and rulings like this one would go the other way.)

The court has ruled twice previously that people held at Guantanamo without charges can go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention. Each time, the administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to try to close the courthouse doors to the detainees. The court specifically struck down a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that denies Guantanamo detainees the right to file petition of habeas corpus.

“The Supreme Court has finally brought an end to one of our nation’s most egregious injustices,” said Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “By granting the writ of habeas corpus, the Supreme Court recognizes a rule of law established hundreds of years ago and essential to American jurisprudence since our nation’s founding.”

What happens next is a little less clear.



We don’t know, for example, whether detainees (some of whom have been held without charges for more than six years) will get prompt legal hearings. We also don’t know, as Kevin noted, what would happen to those labeled “enemy combatants” if they’re tried and found not guilty, since no country, anywhere, will take them.

We do know, however, that a majority of the Supreme Court isn’t buying the president’s unique legal perspective. Lyle Denniston called this a “stunning blow” to the Bush administration’s arguments.

If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion. […] The Court also declared that detainees do not have to go through the special civilian court review process that Congress created in 2005, since that is not an adequate substitute for habeas rights. The Court refused to interpret the Detainee Treatment Act — as the Bush Administration had suggested — to include enough legal protection to make it an adequate replacement for habeas. Congress, it concluded, unconstitutionally suspended the writ in enacting that Act. In a second ruling on habeas, the Court decided unanimously that U.S. citizens held by U.S. military forces in Iraq have a right to file habeas cases, because it does extend to them, but it went on to rule that federal judges do not have any authority to bar the transfer of those individuals to Iraqi authorities to face prosecution or punishment for crimes committed in that country in violation of Iraqi laws.

The issue, then, now returns to Congress. One assumes the Judiciary Committee Chairmen — Pat Leahy in the Senate and John Conyers in the House — will be far less accommodating of the White House’s position than the last time the administration came calling.