Frank Dunham, the public defender in the cases of terror suspect Zacharias Moussaoui and reputed enemy combatant Yaser Esam Hamdi, acknowledges that he didn’t expect the cases to turn out the way they have.
“I didn’t anticipate that I would get sucked into a couple of cases that would have the national media spotlight turned on everything we did,” said Mr. Dunham, the federal public defender for the Eastern District of Virginia since 2001.
He also did not expect that it would pit him against “an administration that I kind of support, and [become] a thorn in the side to people that perhaps I would rather not be.”
But Mr. Dunham, whose efforts to defend the rights of two men deemed terrorists by President Bush have brought one case to a halt and taken the other all the way to the Supreme Court, said, “I’m a Republican who’s a die-hard civil libertarian.”
“I happen to believe that you find some people that get all teary when they talk about constitutional rights,” he said. “You can find some in the Republican Party and you can find some in the Democratic Party, and I happen to be one in the Republican Party that believes that constitutional rights are more important and the government’s power is to be feared as much as the founders feared it.”
On April 28, Mr. Dunham, 61, will argue before the Supreme Court on behalf of Mr. Hamdi, an American-born resident of Saudi Arabia who was captured in 2001 during the U.S.-led war to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had sheltered September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
Although the government previously brought the case of another American caught in Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh, to the federal court system, it argues that Mr. Hamdi can be held and interrogated indefinitely without charges or a trial.
Mr. Dunham, an Alexandria-based federal prosecutor in the 1970s, has been fighting for Mr. Hamdi’s rights since April 2002, not long after he made headlines as the federal public defender for Moussaoui.
The Moussaoui case has played out differently, though, because the administration has attempted to try the Frenchman of Moroccan descent in the criminal court system.
Arrested while in a U.S. flight school about a month before the September 11 attacks, Moussaoui has attempted to defend himself and has voiced distrust of Mr. Dunham.
But the public defender has filed dozens of briefs on behalf of the man U.S. officials think was the planned “20th hijacker.” The briefs raised issues that put the case in a legal quagmire before it ever reached trial.
Although he said that preparing for a Supreme Court case is “like studying for final exams,” Mr. Dunham, who a few weeks ago made the first Supreme Court argument of his career in a case involving the government’s right to conduct searches and seizures, notes that he’s loving the challenge.
“I’m a lawyer, and any lawyer who wouldn’t enjoy these cases probably shouldn’t be a lawyer,” he said. “I mean, these are the cases that when you go to law school you dream about.”
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