Of fair trials and due process

John Burns of the NY Times writes of the fair and balanced justice system in Iraq:

The countdown to the hanging began eight weeks earlier, on Nov. 5, as Raouf Abdel-Rahman, the chief judge in the Dujail case, passed death sentences on Mr. Hussein and two associates, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Mr. Hussein’s half-brother, and Awad al-Bandar, chief judge of Mr. Hussein’s revolutionary court, for crimes against humanity in the hanging of 148 men and boys from the Shiite town. “Go to hell, you and the court!” Mr. Hussein yelled as bailiffs ushered him out.

The widespread expectation was that the appeal of the death sentences would run for months, allowing time for the more notorious Anfal case, involving charges of genocide in the killing of 180,000 Kurds, to be completed before Mr. Hussein was hanged. American lawyers in the embassy’s Regime Crimes Liaison Office, the behind-the-scenes organizer of the trials, predicted Mr. Hussein’s execution in the spring.

When the tribunal’s appeals bench announced that it had upheld the death sentences on Dec. 26, three weeks into the appeal, even prosecutors were stunned. Defense lawyers said Mr. Hussein was being railroaded under pressure from Mr. Maliki, who told a BBC interviewer shortly after the Dujail verdict that he expected the ousted ruler to be hanged before year’s end.

The suspicion that the judges had submitted to government pressure was shared by some of Americans working with the tribunal, who had stifled their growing disillusionment with the government’s interference for months. Among a host of other complaints, the Americans’ frustrations focused on the government’s dismissal of two judges seen as too indulgent with Mr. Hussein, and its failure to investigate seriously when three defense lawyers were killed. The appeals court’s apparent eagerness to fast-forward Mr. Hussein to the gallows — and the scenes at the execution itself — was, for some of the Americans, the last straw.