Guilty Until Proven Innocent

EDITORIAL: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Published: April 12, 2005

The post-9/11 world involves two competing nightmares. One imagines
another terrorist attack that occurs because authorities fail to
respond to signs of danger. The other is about innocent people who are
arrested by mistake and held indefinitely because authorities are too
frightened, or embarrassed, to admit their errors. We have to be
equally vigilant against both.

Right now, two New York City girls, both 16, have been detained and
accused of plotting to become suicide bombers. If there is a real
reason to believe that charge, officials are obviously right to have
acted. But so far, they have said little about the evidence against the
girls, and the girls' friends and families have offered accounts that
suggest the charges could be completely false.

At this point, it's impossible not to worry about a potential
miscarriage of justice, given the number of previous incidents in which
the government has rushed to make a terrorism arrest that turned out to
be baseless.

Details of the cases against the two girls - one from Bangladesh and
the other from Guinea, and both in the country illegally - are sketchy.
According to reporting by Nina Bernstein in The Times, the parents of
the Bangladeshi girl went to the police several weeks ago to file a
complaint about their daughter's defying their authority. When the
dispute was resolved, they tried to withdraw the complaint, but the
police proceeded with an investigation.

The police and federal immigration officials searched her belongings
and are reported to have found an essay on suicide. According to the
family, the essay says suicide is against Islamic law. But detectives
went on to question the girl about her political beliefs before
arresting her. Even less is known about the investigation of the girl
from Guinea. Teachers and students at the high school she attended
expressed outrage at the arrest and at the idea that she could be
plotting terrorism.

The government calls the girls an "imminent threat," and says it has
"evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." But it has not
described the evidence, insisting that national security requires that
much of it remain secret. Because the girls are here illegally, they
have been put into a deportation system that affords them far fewer
rights than ordinary criminal suspects have. There is no definite limit
on how long they can be held.

No one wants to leap to conclusions about a government case in such an
important area. But the record is not reassuring. Last year, the
government wrongly jailed Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer who is a Muslim,
for two weeks after the F.B.I. mistakenly matched his fingerprint to
one found at the scene of the Madrid train bombing. After the Sept. 11
attacks, the Justice Department rounded up hundreds of Muslim men who
were here illegally and detained them for months, often in deplorable
conditions. The department's inspector general later found that the
F.B.I. had made "little attempt to distinguish" those with terrorism
ties from those without. Shortly after 9/11, federal authorities
detained a Nepalese tourist for three months in a tiny cell after he
inadvertently included an F.B.I. building in a videotape of the sights
of New York for folks at home.

More information about the two girls will no doubt surface over time.
If the evidence isn't there, the arrests are very disturbing. The
government will have taken 16-year-olds from their families, branded
them as would-be terrorists and put them into a frightening legal limbo
for no good reason.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company