Lynne Stewart: Lawyer for jihad
Left-wing radical laywer Lynne Stewart will be sentenced this morning for her role in fomenting jihad for her client, convicted jihadist and NYC bomb plotter Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. The Associated Press casts her as a compassionate grandma who just cares too much about her downtrodden clients. She deserves the max for conspiring to spread violent messages to Rahman's followers--actions which resulted in the death of some 100 tourists at Egyptian resorts. Also found in her law offices: a draft fatwa from Rahman calling on jihadists to kill Americans and their children until his release is won.
Stewart To Claim Uncontrolled Emotion Defense
Lynne Stewarts faces sentencing today for acting as a conduit for terrorist Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheikh" who helped organize the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. She transmitted his commands to his followers while in an American prison, helping to launch a terrorist network, and Stewart got convicted for providing material support. She has spent most of the intervening time traveling the nation and speaking out against the government, claiming she did nothing wrong and that the Bush administration wanted to silence her. Now, however, the New York Sun reports that she will change her tune significantly for her sentencing hearing:
The New York lawyer who was convicted of material support for terrorism after carrying messages for her client, terrorist sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, is scheduled to be sentenced today to as much as 30 years in prison.
She and her allies are pinning their hopes for leniency on a strategy that argues she became so emotionally involved in the sheik's case that she acted irrationally — a strategy that is underpinned by a sealed letter to the court from a psychiatrist. ...
It's certainly a new position for Stewart, who has also claimed innocence through a lack of mens rea, the explicit decision to commit a criminal act. She says that her motivation was to ensure that Rahman did not lose any political ground while held by the US because she thought he would get deported instead of imprisoned. She has told the court that her "tragic flaw" is that she cares too much for her clients.
In other words, Stewart wants the court to take pity on her because she's a woman and can't control her emotions.
Nonsense. ...
