On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, the result of a bomb in the luggage compartment. All 259 people aboard and eleven people on the ground were killed. In 1991, after a massive international criminal investigation, Libyan intelligence officers Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah were charged with the deaths. Their motive was alleged to be retribution for the 1986 U.S. bombing of Tripoli.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi refused to turn over the suspects to U.S. or United Kingdom authorities. What followed was eight years of U.S. sanctions against Libya and negotiations involving the U.S., Libya, the U.K., Saudi Arabia and the United Nations in an attempt to bring the suspects to justice. In March, 1999 they were finally turned over to authorities in the Netherlands, where they were tried by a Scottish tribunal. The trial began May 3, 2000 and on January 31, 2001 the three judges acquitted Fhimah and convicted Megrahi, who was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve 20 years before being considered for release. Megrahi’s appeal hearing, the first U.K. judicial hearing ever broadcast publicly, ended with a dismissal.

The government of Libya eventually paid billions of dollars to the victims’ families in order to settle civil lawsuits. After a criminal conviction of willful misconduct regarding its security services, Pan Am was also found civilly liable for the deaths. See, e.g., Pescatore v. Pan American World Airways, Inc., 887 F. Supp. 71 (E.D.N.Y. 1995), aff’d and remanded, 97 F.3d 1 (2d Cir. 1996).

In 2009, Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds after it was found he suffered from terminal prostate cancer. He returned to Libya and as of this writing is still alive. The recent Wikileaks scandal has revealed information indicating that Libya had threatened harsh reprisal against the U.K. if Megrahi died in prison.

Volume 36, Issues 2 & 3 of the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law (“Terrorism on Trial”) features multiple articles examining the Lockerbie trial.

 

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot
We see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

English children’s chant when collecting money for fireworks
on Guy Fawkes Day
Guy Fawkes Day celebrates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of conspirators aimed to restore Catholic rule to England by assassinating King James I and members of Parliament via gunpowder explosion. The celebration is named for the man in possession of kegs of gunpowder when he was arrested shortly after midnight on November 5. The trial for this now infamous act of high treason quickly followed the torture of the conspirators, whose conviction was a foregone conclusion despite pleas of not guilty. The executions were, by statute, quite grisly. Guy Fawkes Day is still marked in the United Kingdom with bonfires and fireworks.

At present, sentences for treason are no longer so gruesome, but still very serious. For their crime today, Fawkes and his co-conspirators would face up to life in prison. (Treason Act, 1998, c. 146, § 1.) In the United States, however, a defendant can still be sentenced to death. (18 U.S.C. § 2381 (2006.)

September 17 marks Constitution Day, commemorating the 1787 date on which thirty-nine of the Philadelphia Convention’s delegates signed the new Constitution.  This year’s theme is one near and dear to lawyers’ hearts – jury service.  Juries as we know them first took shape in 12^th century England, under the reign of Henry II.  These early panels did not quite provide a jury of one’s peers, but they were a decided improvement over trial by combat, where the disputing parties or their chosen delegates beat one another savagely until only one was left standing.  So when you receive your jury summons, think of it this way:  although you may be mildly inconvenienced, you may also be saving someone from a UFC-style beat-down!

Jury service in the United States has also resulted in numerous contributions to pop culture, ranging from the great (Twelve Angry Men), to the mediocre (Runaway Jury), to the downright awful (Pauly Shore’s Jury Duty).  And, don’t forget all the work provided to New York City extras during the twenty-year run of Law & Order.  Think of it as Henry II’s economic stimulus package.

Further reading:

The American Jury System by Randolph N. Jonakait, KF8972 .J66 2003.

The Palladium of Justice by Leonard W. Levy, KD 7540 L48 1999.

 

 

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

The 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on August 18, 1920 and took effect ninety years ago today (August 26), enfranchised more than 26 million women.  The campaign for female suffrage officially began in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention but it took more than 70 years for Congress to pass the amendment in 1919. Ratification by the states would require just over one year, despite strong Southern resistance.  Ultimately, Tennessee provided the necessary 36^th vote (three-quarters of the then 48 states).  It was not until 1970 that the last of the then 48 states ratified the amendment.

Read more:

Exploring Constitutional Conflicts

ourdocuments.gov

May 17 marks the anniversary of the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Prior to Brown, many parts of the United States permitted segregation in public education based on the principle of ‘separate but equal,’ a doctrine based on the longstanding decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.  Brown brought together cases from four different states challenging the validity of that doctrine.

The court considered whether segregation was consistent with the framers’ intent in the Fourteenth Amendment but found little support there for overruling Plessy.  In order to forge a unanimous opinion, the justices rested their decision on the critical role education plays in determining personal opportunity and development, finding that racial segregation generated irreversible feelings of inferiority in black children. The court concluded that segregated schools were inherently unequal and abandoned the premise that ‘separate but equal’ did not cause harm or stigmatization.

Further resources:

Landmark Supreme Court Cases: A Reference Guide, Donald E. Lively (Greenwood Press, 1999).

Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture and the Constitution, Robert J. Cottrol (University Press of Kansas, 2003).

Education Law Stories, Michael A. Olivas (Foundation Press, 2007).

Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States, David S. Tanenhaus (Macmillan Reference USA, 2008).

April 18 marks the birthday of Clarence Darrow in Kinsman, Ohio.  Although Darrow never completed his studies at the University of Michigan Law School, he became a legal apprentice and gained admission to the bar in 1878.

Darrow’s most infamous cases lay in the field of criminal defense. In 1924 he defended the notorious thrill killers Leopold and Loeb, affluent Chicago teens who murdered another boy with no motive other than trying to commit “the perfect crime.” Darrow, opposed to the death penalty, convinced them to plead guilty, and then set about saving them from execution. His presentation of a large amount of psychiatric testimony proved successful; Leopold and Loeb escaped hanging and each received sentences of life plus 99 years.

In 1925, Darrow defended John T. Scopes, a Tennessee schoolteacher charged with teaching evolution.  Darrow‘s unconventional defense included calling one of the prosecutors, William Jennings Bryan, as a witness. Bryan claimed to be a fundamentalist who interpreted the words of the Bible as the literal truth, but Darrow elicited Bryan’s admission that sometimes he interpreted passages on his own. Darrow’s examination of Bryan was seen as a blow to religious fundamentalism and a setback to the anti-evolution forces.  Although Scopes was convicted, the verdict was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court a year later.

Darrow retired shortly after the Scopes case and spent the following years lecturing. He died at his Chicago home in 1938.

For further information:

The Story of My Life, by Clarence Darrow

FBI documents related to Clarence Darrow

The People v. Clarence Darrow, by Geoffrey Cowan

Inherit the Wind, dramatization of the Scopes Trial

Compulsion, dramatization of the Leopold and Loeb Trial

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has made available in electronic form the health care reform bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this past weekend.  Click here for a PDF document that provides links to the Act, the Reconciliation Act, and the House floor debate.

 

Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827 to provide a voice against racism and intolerance, was the first newspaper published in the United States by and for African-Americans.  A number of sources place its home at 236 Church Street, which is today encompassed by NYLS’ 57 Worth Street building. This neighborhood was home to a large number of free northern blacks who, at that time, constituted a small minority in the city.

Freedom’s Journal denounced slavery and lynchings and advocated for black suffrage. It also published articles on how the U.S. legal and political systems helped to perpetuate slavery.  But the publication itself was not long-lived. Founding editor John Brown Russwurm published the last issue in 1829, shortly before emigrating to Liberia.

Read more about Freedom’s Journal in the Fall/Winter issue of New York Law School Magazine. You can access a copy of the article here.

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