Supreme Court Ruling
On June 12, 2008 the Supreme Court ruled, in the case Boumediene v. Bush 5-4, that Guantanamo captives were entitled to access the US justice system. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion:
"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."
The Court also ruled that the Combatant Status Review Tribunals were "inadequate". Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens joined Kennedy in the majority.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in the minority report, called the CSR Tribunals:
"...the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants."
Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia joined Roberts in the dissent.
Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the organization that initiated the action that triggered the Supreme Court ruling responded:
"The Supreme Court has finally brought an end to one of our nation's most egregious injustices. It has finally given the men held at Guantánamo the justice that they have long deserved. By granting the writ of habeas corpus, the Supreme Court recognizes a rule of law established hundreds of years ago and essential to American jurisprudence since our nation's founding. This six-year-long nightmare is a lesson in how fragile our constitutional protections truly are in the hands of an overzealous executive."
Read more about this topic: Combatant Status Review Tribunal
Famous quotes containing the words supreme, court and/or ruling:
“Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn’t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.”
—Marguerite Duras (b. 1914)
“Of all things in life, Mrs. Lee held this kind of court-service in contempt, for she was something more than republican—a little communistic at heart, and her only serious complaint of the President and his wife was that they undertook to have a court and to ape monarchy. She had no notion of admitting social superiority in any one, President or Prince, and to be suddenly converted into a lady-in-waiting to a small German Grand-Duchess, was a terrible blow.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high,
Upon our life a ruling effluence send.
And when it fails, fight as we will, we die;
And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)