The Supreme Court agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees can use the federal courts to challenge their confinement. This controversy would reverse a previous decision not to hear their plea on the issue. Bush administration pushed a law through Congress last year, that designated these detainees as an enemy combatants and thus stripped them of any right to use the federal courts to challenge the legality of their detention. The judges hearing the case surprisingly changed their view on the topic and have decided to listen to the case instead. The Military Commissions Act had taken away federal court jurisdiction to consider detainees' challenges to their confinement, but this new turn of events goes against this earlier decision. The detainees' legal team had said that dismissing the petitions would be "a profound deprivation" of the prisoners' right to speedy court review. Despite their prisoner status, they Guantanamo Bay detainees are fighting to receive full rights in the US Courts.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070630/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_guantanamo&printer=1;_ylt=Ag3cj4JFwSz.GyWTQQ0EYCJAw_IE
As stated in the summary, this article deals with a due process of law and a person's right to a speedy trial. I found this article very interesting because it's an example of the 'special circumstances' that can arise when addressing people's rights. By labeling the prisoners as enemy combatants, they were stripped of the usual rights a person is entitled to when dealing with the law. It's interesting to see that they still retained some of these rights though, like the right to an attorney and to hear witness testimonies. It just goes to show that there are sometimes exceptions to the rule, and the government had tried prepare for this by making a person's rights fairly broad and subject to court interpretation in special cases like this one.
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Really depends on what some detainees did to end up in Guantanamo bay, but unless they have not been tried before, all human beings have the right to a fair trial before being sentenced
I believe that even as an "enemy" when someone is in the United States, they should have the same rights of due process and a speedy trial since they are being tried in this country. Otherwise, if it happened that the government was trying to keep someone "quiet", they could just call that person an enemy and get away with it in highly emotional political cases. Not to say this will or has happened, but while the potential for it is there, we should think ahead.
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