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Government Drops Appeal in Connecticut Patriot Act CaseFederal prosecutors announced April 12 that they would drop their appeal in a case involving a Connecticut library system that received a demand for patron records under the USA Patriot Act.The American Civil Liberties Union—which filed the original suit, Doe v. Gonzales, seeking release for its unnamed client from the gag provision of the Patriot Act’s Section 505—said it will identify the library involved and give the librarian a chance to speak after court proceedings are completed, the Associated Press reported April 12. U.S. District Court Judge Janet Hall had removed the gag order related to the case September 9, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan granted the Department of Justice’s request for a full stay while it appealed the decision. U.S. Attorney Kevin O’Connor said April 12 that the appeal no longer made sense, since the unnamed client had been identified in news reports as George Christian, executive director of the Library Connection consortium, and the Patriot Act had been changed to include a procedure for requesting an exemption from the gag order. The ACLU called the DOJ’s concession a victory, but criticized the government for stifling debate while Congress was considering the act’s renewal. “Here is yet another example of how the Bush administration uses the guise of national security to play partisan politics,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. “The American public should keep this in mind the next time a government official invokes national security in defense of secrecy.” In an April 12 statement, American Library Association President Michael Gorman called the government’s timing “highly suspicious, coming merely a month after the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act. The American public should be outraged that the one person in the United States who could have spoken from real experience with a national security letter, and who was seeking to join the national debate, was forbidden from doing so until after that debate was complete.” “The Second Circuit Court of Appeals should dismiss the government’s appeal of Judge Hall’s decision and uphold her ruling that the gag order accompanying the NLS provision was unconstitutional,” Gorman added. Posted April 14, 2006. |
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