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Anti terror laws increasingly used against common criminals { September 9 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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State News
Anti-terror laws increasingly used against common criminals
September 09, 2003
In the two years since the nation began giving law enforcement agencies fresh powers to help them track down and punish terrorists, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned the force of the new laws not on al-Qaida cells, but on people charged with common crimes.
The Justice Department said it has used authority given to it by the USA Patriot Act to crack down on currency smugglers and seize money hidden overseas by alleged bookies, con artists and drug dealers.
Federal prosecutors used the act in June to file a charge of "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction" against a California man after a pipe bomb exploded in his lap, wounding him as he sat in his car.
A county prosecutor in North Carolina charged a man accused of running a methamphetamine lab with violating a state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons.
If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get from 12 years to life in prison for a crime that usually puts a person behind bars for about six months.
Watauga County District Attorney Jerry Wilson said he isn't abusing the law, which passed two months after the Sept. 11 attacks and defines chemical weapons of mass destruction as "any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury and ... is or contains toxic or poisonous chemicals or their immediate precursors."
Civil liberties and legal defense groups, though, have been bothered by the string of cases, and say the government will soon routinely be using harsh anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.
"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. "They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens."
Prosecutors aren't apologizing.
Stefan Cassella, deputy chief for legal policy for the Justice Department's asset forfeiture and money laundering section, said that while the Patriot Act's primary focus was on terrorism, lawmakers were aware when they passed it that it contained provisions that had been on prosecutors' wish lists for years, and which would be used in a wide variety of cases.
In one case prosecuted this year, investigators used a provision of the Patriot Act to recover $4.5 million from a group of telemarketers accused of tricking elderly U.S. citizens into thinking they had won the Canadian lottery. Prosecutors said the defendants had posed as lottery officials, and told victims that they would receive their prize as soon as they paid thousands of dollars in income tax on their winnings.
Before the anti-terrorism act, U.S. officials would have had to use international treaties and appeal for help from foreign governments to retrieve the ill-gotten cash, which had been deposited in banks in Jordan and Israel. Now, using their new powers, they simply seized it from assets held by those same banks in New York and Philadelphia.
"These are appropriate uses of the statute," Cassella said. "If we can use the statute to get money back for victims, we are going to do it."
Still, the idea of the government using hastily passed anti-terrorism legislation to go after people who aren't terrorists has made some uneasy.
The Patriot Act erased many restrictions that had barred the government from spying on its citizens, granting agents new powers to use wiretaps, conduct electronic and computer eavesdropping and access private financial data.
Some of those restrictions had been enacted after past abuses _ including efforts by the FBI to spy on civil rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators during the Cold War _ and Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said it isn't far fetched to believe that the government might overstep its bounds again.
"I don't think that those are frivolous fears. It's not just rhetoric. It is justifiable criticism," Lynch said. "We've already heard stories of local police chiefs creating files on people who have protested the (Iraq) war ... The government is constantly trying to expand its jurisdictions, and it needs to be watched very, very closely."
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On the Net:
Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov
American Civil Liberties Union: http://www.aclu.org
ŠNEPA News 2003
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