Posted on 10/19/2007 6:57:57 PM PDT by Calpernia
An Egyptian student detained after a pilot's aviation radio was found in his hotel room following the Sept. 11 attacks should be allowed to sue an FBI agent over his imprisonment, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Abdallah Higazy, the son of an Egyptian diplomat, should be allowed to try to prove that the actions of an FBI agent, Michael Templeton, caused him to be unjustly criminally charged and imprisoned for 34 days.
Higazy claimed he was charged with making false statements after Templeton coerced him into changing his story several times by screaming at him, lying to him and threatening him.
The student became embroiled in the wide ranging probe into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks after a worker at the Millennium Hilton Hotel overlooking the trade center site said that a handheld pilot radio was found in a safe in the room where Higazy had been staying on Sept. 11.
After leaving the hotel in a rush along with other guests on that day, he was summoned to return on Dec. 17, 2001, to collect his belongings. The FBI then began to question him about the pilot radio.
Higazy was charged with making false statements to investigators when he told them several different stories about how the radio had come to be in his room. Prosecutors said the radio was found in the safe, on top of a Quran and his passport.
He was freed only after another hotel guest, a private pilot, went to claim his own belongings on Jan. 14, 2002 and told hotel officials that the radio belonged to him.
A hotel security guard later confessed that he falsely stated to FBI agents that the radio was found in a locked safe in the student's room when it was actually found on a table in the room, where it could have been moved by hotel employees following the attacks.
Rebecca Carmichael, a spokeswoman for government lawyers, said she had no comment on the ruling.
Jonathan Abady, a lawyer for Higazy, called the ruling important and said it marked "a great day for the Constitution.''
"The Constitution of the United States does not permit a law enforcement official to coerce a confession and introduce it against an individual in a criminal proceeding,'' he said.
Abady said Higazy responded to FBI threats against himself and his family by concluding, "if I tell them what they want to hear, I'll go to prison and my family will be spared.''
The lawsuit claimed that the coercion and use of the confession at a bail hearing to keep Higazy detained was a violation of his Fifth Amendment guarantee against compulsory self-incrimination.
The appeals court said prior court rulings had firmly established by early 2002 that a coerced confession could not constitutionally be used against a defendant in a criminal case, including at a bail hearing.
The appeals court overruled a lower court judge who had tossed the civil lawsuit out.
It said it needed to decide if a law enforcement officer in Templeton's position would have known that he was violating Higazy's rights if he let a coerced confession be used to keep him incarcerated and to support criminal charges.
"We believe that a reasonable jury could conclude that he would,'' the appeals panel wrote.
The jury could conclude "that it was not reasonable for an officer to believe that it was constitutional to coerce a confession and then to hand that information to a prosecutor -- without divulging the means by which the confession was acquired -- for use in a criminal case.''
Higazy was in the hotel as two hijacked planes were flown into the twin towers because he was assigned there by a student aid group in Washington when he arrived later than expected for classes at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, where he was a graduate computer engineering student. In the late 1980s he attended D.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., and Northern Virginia Community College. He now lives and works in Egypt.
ping
Everyone who's sworn to protect us....the military, the FBI, the cops, civvy contractors in Iraq, you name it....they're all vulnerable to be sued into oblivion now.
No one in their right mind will want to join any of these professions....or if they do, they'll be blithering idiots unable to find jobs elsewhere.
The media and the liberal judges in our system will destroy this nation very quickly.
Leni
This is ground war USA style.
We have an illegal that was deported back to India. He got permission from the Edison NJ Mayor to sue the police officer that profiled him. The illegal was on the terror watch list and tried to insight a riot.
Is that some kind of Hindu mystical trick?
His name was Rajnikant Parikh and he is suing from his village in India.
background:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1708195/posts
Clemenza, http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2007/10/feds_review_immigration_case_o.html
update
Hi,
How much of this nonsense would have been permitted to go on during WWII? If we are really at war with an enemy that hides among the civilian population, violates the Geneva Conventions by fighting while not in uniform, then some practices will just have to change. The priorities of our elites are getting dysfunctional.
Magooey
So why DID he have the radio? or was it not really a radio?
Too many lawyers are politicians. They would never recognize their own actions as terroristic. But lawsuits are used in attempt to force political change.
Higazy says it wasn’t his. The hotel officials now say they lied about finding it in his room.
His lawsuit should be against the hotel officials who lied, not the agent who investigated.
Curious, isn’t it?
Hi
Would defendants have any decent basis for counter-lawsuits?
The political changes you point to are being foisted on us. One likely result is another huge terror strike in the West. Is there a plausible political scenario that won’t let the global elites backtrack as they eventually were able to do after 911?
Ultimately, will we have to have an Oliver Cromwell type figure to clean out the mess? The crystal ball darkens, and today is over for me, I’m afraid.
Magooey
>>>Would defendants have any decent basis for counter-lawsuits?
I think we need the judges cleaned out first. No matter how good the lawyers, as long as judge shopping can occur, the bad guy wins.
Even Shakespeare knew what to do with them.
“the son of an Egyptian diplomat”
State pulling some strings behind the scenes.
Get some $$$$$ for their guy and all is forgiven.
Hope you don't mind the correction. :-)
“Jonathan Abady, a lawyer for Higazy, called the ruling important and said it marked “a great day for the Constitution.’’”
So can someone explain to me when the U.S. Constitution applies to someone who has not sworn an oath to it (an Egyptian national)?
People have been using the Constitution to support the civil rights of non US citizens or legal residents for a while now, and I wanted to know if there really was a precedent for this, or just judical activism. Thanks.
This first thing I did was searches onto the ‘legal’ message forums to see what the chat was about this case. This case was total activism.
MinuteGirl, this Country is gone. Thanks to the Democrats, news media, public educational systems.
For the most part, our males have and are being feminized, our females have been and are being masculinized. Both are being homosexualized. More and more Americans are demanding that the Government provide for them from the cradle to thhe grave. Instead of being self reliant.Fewer and fewer males consider it their duty to protect the femalesi.e. their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters.
Where I was growing up,a man or boy would not even cuss in front of a girl or lady. If that happened andother man or boy would call him on it, and if necessary, emphasize the point by giving the offender a bloody nose.
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