Panel: "Guantanamo Redux"

This panel, recorded on May 10th, 2011, and sponsored by the American Constitution Society and the International Human Rights Law Society featured three prominent trial lawyers from Illinois, Florida, and New York involved in the defense of Guantanamo detainees and in numerous other complex criminal cases. 

Thomas Anthony Durkin has been admitted by the U.S. Department of Defense to The Pool of Qualified Civilian Defense Counsel to Practice Before the Military Commissions, and presently serves on the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Select Committee on Military Tribunals and Terrorism. He also serves as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Center for Civil and Human Rights of the University of Notre Dame Law School.  Mr. Durkin’s efforts to defend several Guantanamo Bay detainees have attracted national attention and praise. He served as counsel, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City, for two detainees at Guantanamo Bay who have since been returned to their home countries, for which he and his firm, along with all other Guantanamo counsel, received the 2007 Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights.  Mr. Durkin was selected in 2008 to be a participant in the John Adams Project, a joint effort of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to provide civilian defense counsel to assist the military lawyers in the trial of the five High Value Detainees charged in U.S. v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, et al., in the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba with conspiring to orchestrate the September 11th attacks of the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Linda Moreno has successfully defended clients in a number of high profile cases including Dr. Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian professor, in a case that the government described as the seminal test of the Patriot Act in United States vs. Sami Amin al-Arian, et al. After a 6-month trial, which garnered international attention, the jury refused, in a 53-count indictment, to return a single guilty verdict against Dr. al-Arian and acquitted him of several of the most serious charges.   Ms. Moreno also represented the chairman of the board of the pre-eminent Muslim charity in America in the federal prosecution of United States vs. Holy Land Foundation, et al, in Dallas, Texas.  Ms. Moreno has lectured on civil liberties and terrorism prosecutions at various universities and institutions, including Columbia University Law School and  Yale Law School. She has appeared on numerous panels, both in the United States and abroad, on subjects involving civil liberties in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001.

Joshua L. Dratel has stood up for individual rights in some of the past three decades' most complicated and important cases both factually and legally, including the investigations and prosecutions of major construction companies, a telecommunications giant, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and representation of political and business leaders. He has appeared for defendants in nine different federal districts, and has written or argued appeals in the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits.  Mr. Dratel's honors include the Frederick Douglas Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights in 2007, the Robert C. Heeney Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in 2006, and the Clarence Darrow Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho in 2005.  Mr. Dratel was named one of New York's Super Lawyers for both 2008 and 2009.  Mr. Dratel is co editor of The Torture Papers: The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press: 2005), which won the American Association of Publishers 2005 Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing (Law and Legal Studies).