No Excuse

New York lawyer Lynne Stewart was convicted Thursday of helping terrorists by smuggling messages of violence to terrorists from her imprisoned client -- a radical Egyptian sheik:

The verdict left Stewart, 65, a firebrand, left-wing activist who has represented radicals and revolutionaries in 30 years on the New York legal scene, slumped in her chair, shaking her head. . .

Stewart, wiping away tears that she said stemmed from worries about how her family will do without her, continued: "We are not going to give up. We're going to fight on. This is the beginning of a larger struggle."

Stewart committed her life to the struggle, condoning mass murder in the name of the movement:

I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people's revolution.

Stewart was perfectly willing to promote such totalitarianism here at home:

"Ms. Stewart suggested that violence and revolution were sometimes necessary to right the economic and racial wrongs of America’s capitalist system." Among other things, Lynne Stewart said this: "I don’t believe in anarchistic violence, but in directed violence. That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, and sexism, and the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support."

At trial, Stewart testified "that she believed violence was sometimes necessary to achieve justice: 'To rid ourselves of the entrenched, voracious type of capitalism that is in this country that perpetuates sexism and racism, I don't think that can come nonviolently.'" Of course, her commitment to violence was anything but consistent: she vigorously opposed the invasion of Iraq.

When Stewart was arrested, civil libertains proclaimed the prosecution phony, and predicted it would broadly vitiate attorney-client privilege. But the case wasn't close--Stewart knew the difference between counsel and conspiracy:

Prosecutors said Stewart and the others carried messages between the sheik and senior members of a Egyptian-based terrorist organization, helping spread Abdel-Rahman's venomous call to kill those who did not subscribe to his extremist interpretation of Islamic law.

At the time, the sheik was in solitary confinement in Minnesota under special prison rules to keep him from communicating with anyone except his wife and his lawyers.

Prosecutor Andrew Dember argued that Stewart and her co-defendants ssentially "broke Abdel-Rahman out of jail, made him available to the worst kind of criminal we find in this world — terrorists."

Stewart transcended the law to assist terrorists. Powerline quotes law professor Peter Margulies, of Roger Williams University, "I think lawyers need to be advocates, but they don't need to be accomplices." The law givith and the law taketh away.

More:

Must be something going around. Heh.