Court to Decide Detainees' Rights

Nov. 27, 2007— -- Supreme Court justices will hear a dispute next week over the rights of Guantanamo detainees that presents a fundamental question of prisoners' ability to be heard in court. The case arises as the justices increasingly exert their authority in terror-related clashes.

In recent years, the Supreme Court and President Bush have engaged in a contentious series of chess moves over the legal rights of foreigners held at Guantanamo and detainees elsewhere. Three times since 2004, the court ruled against Bush detention policies. In opinions and statements from the bench, the justices have shown particular impatience with administration efforts to keep detainees' cases from federal judges.

"The court doesn't like to be told, 'You don't have a role to play here,' " University of Chicago law professor Dennis Hutchinson says.

At the same time, Hutchinson and other legal experts observe, the justices have voiced concern over the administration's power to deal with terrorist threats. "I think that many of the justices have approached these cases pragmatically," Vanderbilt law professor Suzanna Sherry says. "There is no clear right answer. They are trying to balance the need to prevent terrorism with individual rights."

One signal of the justices' interest in monitoring terrorism cases was their handling of the dispute they will hear Dec. 5. In April, the justices declined to intervene in the case. On June 29, in an unprecedented order, they reconsidered and announced they would decide the Guantanamo prisoners' basic rights after all.

Justice John Paul Stevens, 87, a World War II veteran who earned the Bronze Star, has taken the lead on recent court actions against the administration. Stevens, appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1975, was a law clerk at the Supreme Court in the late 1940s as justices considered disputes lingering from World War II.

Sherry says the court seems keenly aware of its role now and some missteps during that era. She cites a case in 1944 in which the court upheld an order forcing Japanese-Americans to leave their homes in California and other Western states after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. In that case, Korematsu v. United States, the court agreed with the U.S. government that the war justified targeting Americans based on their race. The ruling has been widely criticized in the decades since.