Posts

Lyglenson Lemorin and the Liberty Seven

/40 Comments/in , /by

As a number of you have pointed out, the judge in the second (!) Liberty Seven trial just declared another mistrial. The government’s second failure to convince a jury that these "aspirational terrorists" were a legitimate terror threat has elicited increasingly critical comments:

University of Miami law professor Bruce Winick:

But Bruce Winick, a law professor at the University of Miami, said the second jury stalemate “tells a story. The jury doesn’t trust the government’s credibility here. It’s a trumped-up, overblown case.

”We’re paying the freight for prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, jurors — everyone,” he added. “Don’t we have better things to do with our criminal justice system than to make the defendants run the gantlet over and over again?”

Former USA Matthew Orwig:

"There’s no way to spin this other than to say this is another stunning defeat for the government," said Matthew Orwig, former U.S. attorney in Texas who served on a Justice Department terrorism and national security panel.

Stanford law professor Jenny Martinez:

“In a lot of these cases, the government has really oversold what it’s got,” said Jenny Martinez, an associate professor of law at Stanford who was involved in the Jose Padilla terrorism case. “They’ve held these huge press conferences at the beginning that set up these expectations that the government cannot fulfill.”

Yet, in spite of the increasing criticism of the government’s case, it appears that one man has already served several months of time for this case. The defendant who was acquitted in the first trial, Lyglenson Lemorin, was rounded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and is (as far as I can tell) still in custody awaiting possible deportation.

Lemorin was spirited away from FDC, Miami and transferred to the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, GA, by unknown government agents in the dead of night under secretive circumstances.

Apparently, the government has put Lemorin into deportation proceedings and has asserted in public documents, submitted after the gag order, that "Lemorin has liability in uncharged criminal conduct." That claim presumably makes Lemorin subject to a PATRIOT Act provision that provides the government broad leeway in deporting those with terrorist ties.

Lemorin is a legal US resident who grew up in the US, is married, and has two kids.

Read more →

Get Caught in a Sting, Get Thrown Out of the USA, Get Gagged about It

/18 Comments/in , /by

I suggested last month that the Liberty City Seven indictment looks more and more like a made for TV event, particularly after a mistrial was declared and one of the Seven, Lyglenson Lemorin, was acquitted of all charges. Well, now Lemorin is undergoing his own little Orwellian hell.

On the day of his acquittal, the judge in the case issued an oral gag order pertaining to the upcoming retrial of the remaining six defendants.

A federal judge on Friday aired serious concerns about the possibility of jury tampering in the upcoming retrial of an alleged homegrown terrorism group and ordered that Miami-Dade jurors be selected anonymously for the high-profile case.

[snip]

Her order — an edict normally seen in organized crime or major drug cases — means that potentially hundreds of Miami-Dade voters who receive jury summonses for the retrial in January will be referred to by number, not by name. Jurors’ names were known to both sides in the first trial.

The judge also ordered U.S. marshals to provide criminal background checks on all prospective jurors for both sides, and to escort those chosen for the 12-member panel to and from the courthouse in downtown Miami.

”I do find there is a strong reason to believe the jury needs protection,” Lenard said. “Here we have defendants accused of being members of a terrorist cell.”

No such precautions were taken during the first trial, which ended Dec. 13 in a mistrial for six defendants of the so-called Liberty City 7.

Read more →