Judicial Reports: LexPress: Torture Memo Fight, Con.

By Jesse Sunenblick
jsunenblick@judicialstudies.com
Posted: 05-09-08 

A Southern District Judge might make public a CIA memo that allegedly specifies the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique. In other news, the office of State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announces its latest targets: politically connected lawyers illegally receiving public pension funds.

PUBLIC TORTURE, PRIVATE MEMO
Southern District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein might make public a CIA document that allegedly justifies waterboarding as an interrogation technique after all, Newsday reports. He is requesting to view the document after initially declining to let the American Civil Liberties Union, as part of its lawsuit seeking information about the detention and treatment of U.S. prisoners overseas, examine it earlier this year. Then, Hellerstein ruled the document was covered by attorney client privilege. “We think that the public has a right to see the documents that provided a basis for the CIA’s torture program," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project. “We know that interrogators waterboarded prisoners and subjected prisoners to other forms of torture. There’s no legitimate reason why the basis for those interrogation practices should be withheld.”

POLITICAL PATRONAGE PURGE 
From The New York Times comes word of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s latest purge: his office aims to robustly investigate the illegal granting of public pension benefits to hundreds of politically connected lawyers working, typically, as independent contractors for school districts, towns, and other government entities. The scheme generally works by attorneys being classified as public officials — which lets them earn health benefits or become eligible for a state pension — while in return the public entity receives more state funding. “There are political connections on every level,” Cuomo said, suggesting his investigation might lead to criminal charges. “You’ll see state connections between high level state officials, with county connections, village connections. It is a form of low-level political patronage governmental fraud.”

ONE RAISE BEFORE ANOTHER 
A tentative agreement between the Office of Court Administration and the Civil Service Employees Association, a union whose ranks include the majority of court employees, has a wage freeze provision that says nonjudicial workers earning more than $115,000 will defer pay raises for three years. The New York Law Journal has the story. The pay freeze ends no later than March 31, 2011, or whenever state judges receive a pay raise.

TANKLEFF JUDGE'S GRAND JURY CONFLICT
And Newsday reports that attorneys for Martin Tankleff, who was freed last December after serving 17 years for killing his parents when an appellate court overturned his conviction amid new evidence, might try to have Suffolk County Court Judge James Hudson removed from presiding over the grand jury reinvestigating evidence in the case. Hudson, it turns out, worked as a Deputy Bureau Chief in the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office during the original prosecution of the case in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo took over the prosecution of the case after Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota requested a special prosecutor in January.

Posted by Jesse on May 9, 2008 08:15 AM to Judicial Reports