Understanding The New Pollard Legal Case

Justice4JP Release - October 2, 2000

The goal of the new Pollard legal case is to force the truth out into the light for the first time. The case deals with straight constitutional law, not legal loopholes.

The new Pollard legal documents reveal a tale of government misconduct, lies, false allegations and breaches of the plea agreement, inexplicably facilitated by a high-profile Washington defense attorney who failed to perform at the most minimal level of competence to defend his client's constitutional rights to due process.

The documents show how Jonathan Pollard's situation deteriorates even further when a second high-profile Washington attorney takes over from the first one and has to choose between protecting his predecessor's reputation or saving his client. He chooses to cover for his colleague's failures and mounts an appeal for Jonathan that is doomed to failure from the outset.

For reasons that are termed "inexplicable", the Israeli-paid former defense attorneys allowed a situation to be created which set Jonathan up, and permitted the government to continue its lies and misconduct with impunity for the next 13 years. Everyone knew exactly what was happening but they all kept their mouths shut, all looked the other way.

Pollard's attorneys have also requested that the secret files on the case be declassified and made public. Once that occurs it will be obvious that the Government has been lying about the Pollard case for 15 years, and hiding behind a veil of secrecy to obscure that fact.

But even without the secret files, the new case reveals violations of Jonathan's constitutional rights to due process that have been so egregious, so repeated, and so prolonged, that justice can no longer be denied.

In a nutshell, Jonathan Pollard received a life sentence based on government lies and false allegations that to this day, he has never been able to challenge in a court of law. To quote his new legal case:

"[Jonathan Pollard] was sentenced to life in prison because his attorney failed to protect his most basic constitutional rights at sentencing. Those rights included the constitutional right not to be sentenced on the basis of false or incorrect government allegations. Those rights also included the constitutional right to have the U.S. government honor the terms of a plea agreement. Pollard's attorney failed to protect those rights."

The legal document goes on to say:

"Perhaps most egregiously, Pollard's attorney never even filed a Notice of Appeal from his client's life sentence, and never informed Pollard that if he wished to appeal, he had to file a Notice of Appeal within ten days. By those omissions, the attorney deprived Pollard of direct judicial review of the life sentence and of the constitutionally defective process that led to it. After having failed to represent his client effectively at sentencing, and with his client sentenced to life in prison and locked incommunicado in a ward reserved for the criminally insane, Pollard's attorney sealed his client's fate by not even bothering to file a Notice of Appeal so that the Court of Appeals could review the life sentence. In sum, Pollard was deprived of effective assistance of counsel in fundamental and serious ways. His sentence of life in prison was a result of that ineffective assistance."

Justice4JP urges that everyone read the legal documents, located on the new Court Case 2000 Page. This page features a collection of legal communications and updates by Jonathan Pollard's attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP (Park Avenue, New York).