Slashdot Mirror
Snowden Would Return To US If Government Guarantees Fair Trial (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden said if the government would guarantee him a fair trial, he would return to the United States. Snowden spoke via Skype from Russia on Saturday at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, WTOP reported. "I've told the government I would return if they would guarantee a fair trial where I can make a public interest defense of why this was done and allow a jury to decide," Snowden said.
Maybe he understands that freedom is not simply an object of enjoyment, but also intrinsically worthy of the struggle towards it, and not just for himself but also for everyone else?
IANAL, but my understanding of criminal trials is that the accused - not the law - is on trial. My understanding is that the jury needs to decide whether or not the state presented a solid argument for the accused having committed the offense(s) they are accused of. I am not aware of a situation where the jury is tasked with evaluating the validity of the law under which the accused is charged.
I'm not saying that the acts of the NSA were justified or constitutional, I'm just saying that the criminal case against Snowden is not the place where that is to be evaluated.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Offer him a fair trial with a standing executive order that says that the Attorney General must conduct an after the fact review of the US Attorney's conduct and bring criminal charges for even the slightest technicality from Brady violations on down. The slightest misconduct and you're fucking crucified by order of the President.
It would give Snowden no excuse, make us look fair and still accomplish their goal of prosecuting him. They just lacked imagination, I guess.
Robert Blake, AKA Baretta, was accused of killing his second wife and was acquitted in criminal court. He was quoted as saying "In the United States, you're innocent until proven broke."
Like OJ Simpson, he was found guilty in civil court of being liable for her wrongful death.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Exactly. "Fair," in this context, involves the consistent and systematic application of the law to Snowden's case. The government is already required to do that, so asking for guarantees of fairness really doesn't mean much: they'll either follow the law or break it, regardless of what guarantees they make. "Sure we'll give you a fair trial, yeah, that's the ticket.."
However, since he evidently doesn't agree with the law, he presumably would deem any consistent and systematic application of it to be "unfair." (BTW, wouldn't it be nice if all of us could ignore any laws we regard as unfair, especially with tax time just around the corner?)
Therein lies his paradox: unless he is acquitted of all charges, he will believe he has been treated unfairly, ipso facto, QED, de gustibus non disputandum*.
*I threw in some Latin here to make it sound lawyerly.
Having said that, I think the government might have difficulty trying him under a process which is not transparent. It's not like they can state that the material that he purloined is still actually a secret.
Admittedly, the US Government tells its clearance holders that they are not permitted to look at classified material, even if it is leaked to the public, but I don't think that sort of dickery will pass in a civilian court.
I'm not 100% with what Snowden did, but I will become very upset with the government in a way that I was not upset before if they try and run this in any way but a full public jury trial. Yes, there will be parts that will be classified, but in the end, it should not and most likely will not, happen in a Star Chamber.
And the US Government has something to gain from this too. Did Snowden adequately make use of the internal methods for redress that he had instead of extruding this data illegally? It's easy to assume the government would ignore him and retaliate against him, but since he never actually did anything like that, we can't know. The government has the chance to make the case to those people who are listening, that the internal whistleblower protection is there and it can be demonstrated to actually work. They can argue that he was told of how he could address these concerns legally and where he could do that.
Of course, the government may not have those methods at all. And then, I think Snowden may get his satisfaction, if not his freedom. As long as he didn't simply decide he couldn't trust the government, but instead, acted out on his own, he has a chance of making his case, and I will be watching that line of argument very closely. I do not believe that he had a right to just release that material, but I can be convinced that he felt he had no choice after exploring the actual options.
This is, at heart, the only actual defense that Snowden has; that he had a constitutional duty to expose this, and he couldn't do so without violating the trust granted to him by his clearance.
What the government will have no problem doing is proving damage to the country. The damage to the US is actually quite evident, and I personally deal with it every day when I work with EU customers. A false dichotomy has been set up between the US and its intelligence services, and every other country and its intelligence services. It's like lifting only one rock, but knowing there are ants and things under both. Unless you're a company actively competing with a US company in certain sectors, your data is probably as safe in the hands of a US company as it is in anyone else's. Perhaps cold comfort, but I would like to see the EU's Edward Snowden, because I am quite certain that his or her revelations would be similarly interesting.
I think that all Snowden looks for is a fair and impartial conviction.
He won't get it, because the new, improved post-millenium USA doesn't believe in all those old stale ideals like innocent until proven guilty, not using torture, due process and the ability for people to move around the country without restriction.
If he did, he'd almost be certainly using it as a venue to blow the lid off even more hypocrisies, because regardless of his motives his acts were illegal. Then again, his point wasn't to be legal, it was to be moral and the law doesn't recognize moral.
On Saturday, Snowden said some of his former colleagues at the NSA and CIA said "the Constitution doesn't really matter."
If you don't believe the COTUS really matters, then you don't believe in "the rule of law" and that law must be followed in all situations. What it really means is what people currently in power consider important overrides "the rule of law".
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Regardless of personal opinion, your assertion is flawed. From the article you linked:
"In 1988, the Sixth Circuit upheld a jury instruction: "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification." In 'United States v. Thomas (1997), the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law."
Again, I'm not saying it can't happen and I'm not arguing whether it should or shouldn't. I'm just pointing out that it isn't legally recognized.
He doesn't even have an argument for what would be "unfair" about the trail.
It is one thing to disagree about what the law should be, but what a fair trail is isn't that controversial. There are no mainstream arguments that people in the US who are high profile and have access to their choice of lawyers don't get fair trails. That is just silly-talk.
Obviously poor people and minorities often don't get fair trials unless it is high profile, but that isn't Snowden's situation.
He engaged in civil disobedience. Believing you were right to do it does not mean not experiencing the consequences of those acts. When people block a street or engage in a sit-in blocking a lunch counter, they know they will have to serve the time or pay the fine or whatever. A "fair trial" doesn't mean, "if the jury is glad I did it, then I'm not guilty." A trial is to determine if you are guilty of the crime, it is not a popularity contest to decide if the jury still likes you, or if the crime had some happy outcome.
He is like a giant flamebait begging idiots to hang their hats on his crazy argument simply because they dislike the NSA. But you can be against government over-reach and still know what a "fair trail" is. He'd be better off trying to negotiate getting a minimum security white collar prison assignment. Then his supporters could advocate for reduction or commutation of his sentence, something actual possible to receive if the right people agree. Much better than now, where he is constantly asking his supporters to fight for impossible demands.
Try as I might, it's hard for me to see Snowden or anyone else who explicitly breaks their word as any sort of hero or candidate for Giver of Law.
There are three main schools of thought on what constitutes a moral act: a) doing what's right in itself irrespective of the consequences, a.k.a. Virtue Ethics; b) obeying and fulfilling your duties irrespective of the consequences, a.k.a. Deontology; c) doing what will result in the best outcome for the most people irrespective of concepts of virtue or duty, a.k.a. Consequentialism.
It seem clear you subscribe to Deontology. You feel that once you promise and accept a duty, the moral path is to do as you promised and fulfill that duty, otherwise what might happen if everyone began ignoring their word and doing what they feel is right or feel provided the best outcome?
The problem with Deontology is that it only works well (from the other two ethical perspectives) if the duties being fulfilled are themselves virtuous and/or if they provide the best outcome for the majority. For example, let's say you subscribe to the duty of always saying the truth, otherwise what would happen if everyone were free to lie. That's all fine and nice in a good society. In a fascist society however, it leads to telling the SS the truth about those Jews hidden in the third house down the road.
Snowden evidently isn't a Deontologist. He's either a Virtue Ethicist, thinking that bringing evil to light is a good in itself and nothing else matters, or a Consequentialist, thinking that by bringing these facts to light the state of the world will improve for the majority.
Now, here's the fun thing: opting for either of these three ethical frameworks is arbitrary. There's no criteria by which one can objectively conclude one is better than the other. In this it's like religion: you either believe in this, or in that, or in the other, or even in neither.
The we have a second set of criteria: is Law something people create, or discover?
Those who think it's a creation, called Legal Positivists, are usually Deontologists (strong belief in this, almost no belief in exceptions) or Consequentialists (weak belief in this, open to lots of exceptions), and think basically anything goes. Virtue Ethicists, on the other hand, believe Law is discovered, and therefore that you can have laws in the book that are either valid because they express a Natural Law that preexists any human writing it down, or that are invalid because they don't, and then the fact they were written down by someone to be meaningless. Legal Naturalism is a tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, who both wrote on the distinction between true and fake laws.
Since you're a Deontologist, it seems to me you're very likely to also be a Legal Positivist. The law that one must obey is what's in the books, and that's it. Snowden, evidently, disagree, and most everyone who looks at any law and thinks "this is unjust".
And then we have a third sect of criteria: that of the psychological way people think about justice questions. There are six approaches to this, in a scale psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg identified in the 1960's. Here, the important point is that "law agreed upon by different groups as the source of justice and the means by which they don't fight each other" is a strong belief of those fitting what Kohlberg identified as the 4th stage in the scale: "Law and order morality".
Now, I cannot say in which stage Snowden is, but it wouldn't surprise me if he were at stage 5. In stage 5, "Social contract orientation", justice rises from the agreement of individuals, an agreement that can change over time but must be construed by them explicitly as individuals, and not as members (real or perceived) of groups seen as single blocks. As a "stage 5" then, Snowden would find that hidden laws and hidden rules (which are okay from the perspective of stage 4) are something that doesn't provide for true democracy, and decided to put pressure into making things move up.
As you can see then, there are several ways by which Snowden can indeed be seen as someone doing right, even if from your perspective what he did was anything but.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.