Sami al-Arian, one of the nation's most prominent terrorism defendants, was about to be released into his daughter's custody to await a new trial on contempt charges. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg protested, saying that "in this particular culture," a woman could not prevent her father from fleeing.
U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema lashed out at the prosecutor, calling his remark about the Muslim family insulting. Earlier, she had chastised Kromberg for changing a boilerplate immunity order beyond the language spelled out by Congress and questioned whether Arian's constitutional rights had been violated.
"I'm not in any respect attributing evil motives or anything clandestine to you, but I think it's real scary and not wise for a prosecutor to provide an order to the Court that does not track the explicit language of the statutes, especially this particular statute," Brinkema said at the hearing in the Alexandria courtroom.
Kromberg, 51, is in many ways the quintessential post-Sept. 11 prosecutor, a relentless interrogator and sophisticated lawyer who has won convictions in high-profile terrorism cases. But he has been dogged by a pattern of controversial comments and actions that some Muslims say reflects bias against their faith. Those allegations have swirled on the Internet, in the halls of the Alexandria federal courthouse and in sworn affidavits by defense attorneys, who say Kromberg joked about a suspect being tortured, improperly confronted another suspect in public and decried "the Islamization of the American justice system."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/13/AR2008091302275.htmlThis guy sounds like a real winner. :puke:
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