Pollard Asks for Urgent Hearing

Ha'aretz - October 13, 1999 - Moshe Reinfeld

Jonathan Pollard asked the High Court of Justice yesterday for an urgent hearing on a petition he filed recently (Sept. 7, 1999), demanding that the government pay his lawyers' fees and provide financial support for him and his wife. *[Correction: Pollard's petition deals with Government's overall responsibility to him an Israeli agent, and is not a one-issue petition as indicated here. See the Petition for details.]

Pollard, a former civilian analyst for the United States Navy, was convicted of spying for Israel in 1985 and has served 15 years of a life sentence. In the request, filed yesterday by Pollard's wife, Esther, through attorney Baruch Ben-Yosef, Pollard rejected the government's claim that the fees demanded by his lawyers are exaggerated. *[Correction: No specific legal fee was demanded in the petition. Only the principle that lawyers and court costs are part of the package that the Government legally and morally owes to an agent who is arrested and/or sentenced while in the service of the Government.]

"It is outrageous that the respondent denies the petitioner the fundamental right to choose his own legal representation. Instead it continues to try to force him to accept lawyers whose primary contractual obligation is to other parties who have demonstrated little or no interest in actually securing the release of the petitioner," the attorney wrote.

"The government (from 1985-94) spent millions of dollars funding attorneys for the petitioner. For the government these attorneys were a means of distancing itself from the petitioner and of isolating him," he went on. *[When Pollard chose his own attorney in 1994, the Government cut all legal funding.]

Especially clear, according to Pollard, was the failure of a [the first goverment-paid] lawyer appointed to him, who "forgot" to file a document, which would later have allowed Pollard to file a direct appeal. That "the so-called mistake has haunted the petitioner for the last 15 years. Indeed it figured prominently in the U.S. Appellate Court's decision to reject the petitioner's 1991 appeal on procedural grounds, not substantive ones."

Pollard's attorney concluded *[the rebuttal of all of the Government's points]: "The respondent's deliberate evasion of his responsibility to the petitioner... is both an affront to the moral conscience of the State of Israel, and its badge of shame. It is now up to the honored Supreme Court to correct this distorted and immoral precedent.

Justice for Jonathan Pollard Clarifying Notes on The Two Submissions to Supreme Court:

  1. The Request For Emergency Hearing, filed October 12, 1999, asks for a hearing of Petition 6029/99 filed September 7,1999.

  2. In Pollard's Request For Emergency Hearing, he rebuts the fraudulent and misleading statements made by the Government in response to Petition 6029/99.

  3. Notes in *[square] brackets in the text above were inserted by Justice for Jonathan Pollard for clarification.