Professor Karen Greenberg wrote an op-ed for New York Daily News about the recent bombing incident in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.
There is no question Ahmad Khan Rahami, the suspected bomber in this weekend’s bombings, should be prosecuted in U.S. federal court. Rahami is an American citizen who is being tried for a crime perpetrated on American soil. As such, he is guaranteed the right to be charged and tried here.
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Within months of the attacks, the government kept Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen initially charged as a “dirty bomber,” in “enemy combatant” custody without access to a lawyer or the courts. Eventually, wiser heads prevailed. Padilla was moved into federal custody, tried and convicted.
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More recently, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was tried and convicted in federal court, as were the bombers of the First World Trade Center in 1993 and the perpetrators of the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in East Africa in 1998. The severity of the crimes did not mean that the federal court system was incapable of trying them in a timely and constitutionally-protected manner.
