September 11 Controversy
After September 11, 2001, the United States government announced a campaign of aggressive detention, by whatever means possible, of those potentially involved in the attacks on the United States. This included the use of the material witness statute to detain suspects, as opposed to witnesses. Many of those detained as material witnesses were detained as witnesses to grand jury proceedings. This caused controversy for several reasons. Primarily, critics saw the government's use of the material witness statute to detain suspects as an evasion of the Fourth Amendment which provides some protections to criminal suspects that were seemingly ignored in the arrests of the post-September 11 material witness detainees. Secondarily, legal critics took issue anew with the application of the material witness statute to grand jury proceedings. However, statistics on Federal material witness warrant hearings showed a steady decline in their use, from 3603 material witness hearings in FY2000, to 3344 in FY2001 and 2961 in FY2002, and during and after that period the overwhelming majority of material witness warrant hearings took place in judicial districts bordering Mexico and involved illegal alien traffic. Seemingly in response to this controversy, and with the intent of alleviating the concerns over such use of the material witness statute, Senator Patrick Leahy proposed A Bill to Amend the Material Witness Statute to Strengthen Procedural Safeguards, and for Other Purposes, S. 1739 ยง 1. The legislation is currently pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A 2006 ruling found that material witness law could only be employed when an individual is genuinely sought as a witness and there was a flight risk; not to be used as a preventive action. In 2009 a federal court of appeals found that former Attorney General John Ashcroft could be sued personally for wrongful detention by material witness Abdullah al-Kidd, an American citizen arrested in 2003 and held for 16 days in maximum security prisons to be used as a witness in the trial of Sami Omar Al-Hussayen (who himself was acquitted of all charges of supporting terrorism). This decision was unanimously reversed by the United States Supreme Court on May 31st 2011 affirming the constitutionality of the pretextual use of material witness statutes.
Read more about this topic: Material Witness
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“Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.”
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