T. Belman. I see meting out a cruel and unusual punishment to Pollard as a very unfriendly act in keeping with other unfriendly acts such as insisting, for almost 50 years, on Israel retreating to the ’67 lines and making this Iran Deal with total disregard of Israel’s security.
By Bert Raphael, Q.C., LSM
President, The Jewish Civil Rights Association
The news that Jonathan Pollard may be releases in November of 2015 is an announcement that is long overdue.
Some time ago I was retained as Canadian Counsel for Jonathan Pollard. I delivered many speeches on his behalf in Canada and in Israel. I once received a letter from then President Bill Clinton that he would look into the matter.
The tragedy of Jonathan Pollard is that he has served more time in jail for supplying state secrets to a friendly nation than any person ever convicted of supplying state secrets to an enemy. His original Trial was flawed when then Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger sent a note to the Trial Judge asking that a plea bargain that had been in place be rescinded. Such an intervention in Canada would have amounted to a mistrial.
His appeal was dismissed in a 2 to 1 decision with the dissenting Judge saying his conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice. Of the 2 majority Justices on appeal one was Madam Justice Ginsburg, a Jew. She was later elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States. It has been widely reported that if Pollard is released he will not be allowed to visit Israel because his presence would result in a huge public demonstration which would cast the United States in a negative light.
The Pollard case will forever remain as a blight on the American justice system.
I wish that he had been released twenty years ago- from thirty thousand feet above the ground, sans parachute.
It is too late for that.
Everything that Bert Raphael and Bethesdadog say is correct. Try contacting David Turner for his information and insights. David Turner David Turner dt.lcsw@gmail.com
As I have said on this board many times, I have good reason to believe that the sentencing judge, the late Aubrey Robinson, was an anti-semite. I was told this by a former Justice Dept. lawyer who was not involved in the Pollard prosecution, had left the DOJ long before the Pollard case, and expressed his own disdain for Pollard’s actions in the same discussion in which he revealed that Robinson was an anti-semite. He based his opinion on his dealings with Robinson in the D.C. District Court long before the Pollard case. Further, if one reads about the correspondence between Alan Dershowitz and the late Justice Arthur Goldberg (for whom Dershowitz had clerked), you will see some inklings of special hostility by Robinson to Pollard based on allegations in the malicious sentending document submitted to the court by the DOJ. In particular, Robinson reacted very strongly to allegations of Israeli cooperation with apartheid South Africa and this infuriated Robinson, who was black. According to Dershowitz’ account of his communication with Goldberg, this was the explanation given to the late Justice by Robinson for the life sentence. (This is my recollection of my reading about the Dershowitz-Goldberg correspondence some time ago–I have not gone back to check it again. I think I am accurate.) This was an improper motive in the sentencing, I believe. Further, the malicious and libelous information submitted to Robinson in the sentencing phase–including an unwarranted allegation of treason–were the most outrageous and unethical actions possible by the Justice Department. From what I have read, to this day, Pollard’s lawyers have been denied the access to that document in violation of Pollard’s constitutional right of confrontation of his accusers.
So, there is a lot more to the Pollard story. I keep on trying to make this public, but I have no forum, have no contact with Pollard’s team, and no one seems to be listening. I have worked in the field of anti-semitism, and now have litigation experience in the federal courts in the D.C. area, and I believe there are a number of judges who are particularly hostile to Jews, and the worst tend to be often those of Jewish heritage. They truly are “court” Jews, in more than one sense of the term.