Courts Side With NSA On Wiretaps
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 26, 2006
Defense lawyers who had hoped that the public disclosure a year ago of the National Security Agency's wiretapping program would yield information favorable to their clients are being rebuffed by the federal judiciary, which in a series of unusually consistent rulings has rejected efforts by terrorism suspects to access the records.
In at least 17 criminal cases, federal district judges nominated to the federal bench by presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush have ruled against requests to force the government to tell defendants, most accused of terrorism-related crimes, whether the NSA eavesdropped on them without a court warrant.
The rulings indicate that even as public support for the war in Iraq has eroded in polls and as the NSA program has come under criticism from congressional Democrats, and even some Republicans, federal judges may be a bulwark that the Bush administration can rely on to defer to at least some aspects of its wartime policies.
The judges' decisions have come after defense attorneys filed motions requesting access to relevant surveillance intercepts that the government obtained without a warrant. Defense attorneys claim they are entitled to such information and that evidence obtained from warrantless wiretaps is tainted and inadmissible at trial. In many, but not all instances, the motions were filed after a conviction.
Individually, the judges' orders, often very brief and rarely providing explanations, indicate little. Taken together, however, they signal that the judges are unwilling to permit defense attorneys to use prosecutions to force disclosures about the program.
The legality of the NSA program is being litigated in several civil lawsuits across the country. In one case, a district judge in Detroit, Anna Diggs Taylor, ruled in August that the program was unconstitutional, a decision that the government has appealed. Legal observers dispute whether even a ruling by the Supreme Court that the program is unconstitutional would lead to the overturning of criminal convictions in which the program played a role in securing evidence or targeting the defendants.
Courts Side With NSA On Wiretaps - December 26, 2006 - The New York Sun 
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