By JAY WEAVER, Miami Herald
Feb 22, 2007
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Today’s highly publicized hearing about the competency of terror defendant Jose Padilla may be focused on his mental fitness to stand trial in April.
But it’s really about his defense lawyers’ ploy to explore — and expose — for the first time how the one-time “enemy combatant” was treated in military custody for more than three years.
Padilla’s legal team will try to prove that the U.S. citizen who once lived in Broward suffered so much from being tortured at a Navy brig that he cannot assist them at trial. They will have an unprecedented opportunity to question Defense Department officials with direct knowledge of Padilla’s military detention in South Carolina before his transfer to Miami.
But prosecutors will try to stop that kind of inquiry, which they view as trespassing into forbidden terrority. Indeed, they have so stridently argued that Padilla’s prior military detention remain secret that a judge recently invoked Shakespeare to scold them. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said last Friday, before ordering several military officials to testify.
“What’s most important,” she said, “is whether I have enough information to decide whether the defendant is competent to stand trial.”