Can a DA lock up a person before charging him or her with a crime?

[BurtWorm]

I'm not a legal expert, but isn't that utterly forbidden by the Fourth Amendment. Yet that is exactly what was done to Padilla. It took his prosecutors three years after locking him up to come up with a crime to charge him with. And the Supreme Court is allowing him to continue to be held?

:wtf:

It's possible that by allowing the Bushists to drop Padilla into the criminal courts, they're signalling how little they regard the Bushist case up to now. But why, then, wouldn't they let the lower court ruling stand to enable Padilla's lawyers to take the case to the SC so they could make explicit how little they regard their case? And if they thought the Bushist case had merit, why aren't they as pissed as Luttig that the Bushists changed their mind about Padilla as if by magic?

:wtf:

[liberalnurse]

1. I think there is a 48 hour hold law.

They need to charge someone within the 48 hours, if no charges, they need to release the person.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. BW or AW?

Before W or after?
I am not so sure our constitution exists anymore. Yes, there is inertia and we can still post at DU. But the incremental renting, tearing, eroding of that scrap of paper continues.

[bettyellen]

3. normally you can be held a while by police before the DA

brings charges. i forget how long, but you know, you get to call a lawyer and whatnot.
but he's held as an enemy comabatant, not as an ordinary criminal. he had no rights at all.
come to think of it, is he the first instance of * using these "special powers" against US citizens?

[spindrifter]

4. They can arrest you

and confine you if there is probable cause to believe you committed a crime. A judge makes that determination--in some jurisdictions you have to go to court the next "court day" after arrest. In our jurisdiction they can hold you up to 3 work days--good luck if you are busted right before a three-day holiday. If they file, then you get arraigned. If they don't file, you get released, but they could file anytime up to the end of the statute of limitations.

[punpirate]

5. One other available tool...

... which has been abused by the Feds thus far is the use of the material witness claim. Many of the people rounded up immediately after 9/11 and detained indefinitely were held as material witnesses. They could hold them that long because the Feds convinced judges that they were essential witnesses and were flight threats.

The Padilla case is demonstrably different in that Padilla was declared to be an "enemy combatant," a status which, when applied to a US citizen, was at the time a unique instance--that's why the Feds didn't want the Supreme Court to rule on the legitimacy of that classification. That's why the Feds created new charges of Padilla to dump his case into the traditional criminal justice system--it was those new charges by which the Feds hoped to avoid the case being heard by SCOTUS--by saying to SCOTUS, in effect, well, he's in the criminal justice system now, so there's no point in pursuing the enemy combatant status litigation. Legally, it's a specious and devious argument and Luttig knew it.

The greater concern for us as citizens is that someone like Luttig may have hoped that the newly reconstituted Supreme Court would rule in the government's favor in this matter (unlike the rulings in the Hamdi case). He may have seen the Feds' attempt to dump the Constitutional issue as a failure of will and that may have been why he ruled as he did.

Cheers.