Lawyer Is Due for Sentencing in Terror Case

Lynne F. Stewart, the firebrand lawyer known for defending unsavory criminals, now faces the possibility of living out her life like many of them, in maximum-security lockdown in a federal prison.
by Julia Preston

Left, Lynne Stewart in her former law office. She was convicted in 2005 of aiding a high-profile terrorist.

Today, 20 months after she was convicted on terror charges, Ms. Stewart and two co-defendants who were convicted of conspiring with her will be sentenced in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Prosecutors, arguing that Ms. Stewart repeatedly flouted the law to aid the violent designs of an imprisoned terrorist client, have asked Judge John G. Koeltl to condemn her to 30 years in prison.

That would be a life sentence for Ms. Stewart, who turned 67 last week. Long an abrasive advocate of anti-government causes, these days she is not defiant. She is mournful about what she said were her failures as a lawyer.

Her dread of prison deepened unexpectedly, Ms. Stewart said, during the long period after a jury found her guilty on Feb. 10, 2005, of providing material aid to terrorism…

She has recently recovered from breast cancer, but fears it will return in prison.

And if the judge comes down hard, she could be held in solitary confinement with limited visits, the same conditions as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the terrorist she was convicted of aiding.

All three defendants have had to wait for sentencing while Ms. Stewart was treated for cancer. She has finished radiation treatments, she said, and her doctors have declared that she is cancer-free. But she worries about the medical care in prison.

I feel very threatened by it, Ms. Stewart said. I know too much about the way they deal with you in prison.

Ms. Stewart’s sentencing will culminate a case the Bush administration cites as a major counter-terrorism achievement. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who brought the indictment, devoted a full chapter to the case in his new memoir.

Ms. Stewart still denies that she acted to further any violent goals of the sheik, a blind Islamic cleric from Egypt who is serving a life sentence for a thwarted 1993 plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Whatever the sentence, her lawyers have said they will appeal the case.

But in documents they submitted to persuade Judge Koeltl to be lenient and give her no prison time, Ms. Stewart is newly remorseful about ill-advised moves on behalf of her client.

I still believe it was justifiable but perhaps not in the way that I did it, Ms. Stewart said in a sober interview in a borrowed room in the Manhattan offices where she used to practice law. She was speaking of her actions in June 2000 to violate strict prison rules, known as special administrative measures, by publicizing a message from the sheik to his militant followers in Egypt.

The government’s call for a 30-year sentence jolted her, she said, into deeper self-criticism.

Stewart’s criminal conduct, which lasted more than two years, was both extremely dangerous and devious, two assistant United States attorneys, Andrew Dember and Robin Baker, wrote in their sentencing motion. Her actions, they said, should be offensive to those actually zealously defending criminal defendants within the bounds of the law.

There was never any question during the eight-month trial that Ms. Stewart had broken the rules by releasing the sheik’s statement, which said he no longer supported a cease-fire by his followers in Egypt. Another defendant, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, 47, a Staten Island postal worker, was convicted of negotiating with the militants by telephone to promote an end to the cease-fire.

The government wants a life sentence for Mr. Sattar. It is seeking 20 years for Mohamed Yousry, the Arabic translator who was convicted of helping Ms. Stewart smuggle Mr. Abdel Rahman’s messages out of prison.

These days, Ms. Stewart says, what stings is that she agrees with some of prosecutors’ claims about her faulty legal work.

In her trial testimony, she said she believed that she could stretch the prison rules because she regarded them as unconstitutional. But the argument was weak because, as prosecutors noted, she never made a formal legal challenge.

She said that she completely misjudged how prosecutors viewed the sheik and the leeway she could take in defending him, as terrorism became an increasing threat to the United States. To me, the sheik was part of the demonized other, she said, part of a continuum with other violent radicals she had defended more successfully, including members of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers.

She admits that she became too close to the sheik, insisting it was because of his deteriorating health and sanity after years in solitary confinement, not any affinity with his Islamic fundamentalism.

I ignored any warning signs, Ms. Stewart said. I led with my heart instead of my head and thought it would be all right.

While Ms. Stewart says she regrets some of her actions, one co-defendant, Mr. Yousry, is not offering any apologies to the judge.

I wish to God I can say I’m sorry, he said in an interview. But I’m not guilty and I’m not going to say I’m sorry for something that I didn’t do.

In the past months, Mr. Yousry, 51, has gone from bewildered to angry, reliving the trial in his mind. He was fired from a teaching job at the City University of New York when he was indicted and can no longer find work as a translator. Out on bail, he spends his time at home in Bridgeport, Conn.

Mr. Yousry said he keeps coming back to the fact that he, unlike Ms. Stewart, never signed an agreement to uphold the rules that restricted communication with the sheik. The evidence confirmed that he acted on specific instructions from Ms. Stewart. Prosecutors acknowledge that Mr. Yousry, who is not a practicing Muslim, did not support the sheik’s ideas or violence. They have called him the least culpable defendant.

In a letter to the judge, Michael Gasper, a history professor at Yale, said Mr. Yousry had long shown an obvious and unconcealed distaste for any brand of Islamic activism.

Mr. Yousry has never broken rank with Ms. Stewart. But his voice rose when he discussed how she handled the sheik’s case.

My job wasn’t to tell the lawyer what to do, he said. Lynne is known as an in-your-face kind of lawyer. She lives for the moment when she can stand up to the government and challenge them on issues. That’s her thing. That’s Lynne Stewart, not Mohamed Yousry.

There was little sympathy for Ms. Stewart among mainstream lawyers during the trial. But more than 400 letters she submitted to Judge Koeltl about her sentence include many from law professors and criminal defense lawyers who said that her actions never caused actual harm and warned of a chilling effect on lawyers who defend terrorists if she receives a long sentence. Her lawyers cite her long service as a government-appointed lawyer for rebels, mobsters and murderers.

Jo Ann Harris, a former assistant attorney general who authorized the 1994 indictment of Mr. Abdel Rahman, wrote that the terrorism counts against Ms. Stewart were unwarranted overkill.

Ms. Stewart’s failing, she wrote, was that she didn’t have a clue that the stick she was poking in the government’s eye was going to have consequences beyond her imagination.

The author Gore Vidal wrote to ask the judge to side with our Bill of Rights by not imprisoning Ms. Stewart.

Ms. Stewart said that while her radical leftist views have not changed, she will continue to fight within the system. I really think that my patriotism if you’ll excuse the expression and my love of this profession demand that I have to stay and fight.