Lynne F. Stewart, born on October 8, 1939 in Brooklyn, New York, is an activist as well as an attorney who is famous for representing high profile defendants.
Lynne Stewart spent her childhood and adolescent years in Bellrose, Queens with her mother Irene, and her father John Feltham. Stewart comes from a family of English/Irish and Swedish/German descent. In her earlier years, she attended New York City’s Martin Buren High School. After high school, from 1957 to 1960, she studied at Hope College, a liberal arts college situated in Holland, Michigan. Later, she attended the American University, a private United Methodist-associated research university based in Washington, D.C. In June of 1961, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from Wagner College in Staten Island, New York. Three years later, she earned her Master’s degree in Library Science from Pratt University in Brooklyn. She obtained her Juris Doctor in June of 1975 from Rutgers University School of Law, a law school located in Newark, New Jersey. Stewart was then admitted to practice in New Jersey in 1975 and in New York, a year after.
She has defended high profile clients accused of robbery, murder and attempted murder, bombings, airjacking, and police brutality. With her outspoken political standpoints and enthusiastic representation of these, she has gained popularity in the.
Over the years, Lynne Stewart has earned a lot of support from the National Lawyers Guild, where she was once a member. Among her other supporters are the National Association of Criminal Defense Against Lawyers and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
From defending charged members of the Black Liberation Army to defending a blind Arab leader accused of bombing the World Trade Center, Lynne Stewart has been more than active and a revolutionary for protecting and fighting for the falsely indicted.
LYNNE STEWART 
Individual Profile:
--> - Attorney who represented Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who was convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
- Was arrested for providing material support to Rahman’s al Qaeda-connected Islamic Group, an Egypt-based terrorist organization
- Considers terrorists “liberationists”
The self-proclaimed “radical activist attorney” Lynne Stewart was born on October 8, 1939 in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Hope College and American University before earning her B.A. in Political Science from Wagner College in 1961. She went on to acquire a Master’s Degree in Library Science from Pratt Institute, and in 1975 she earned her J.D. from Rutgers School of Law.
Over the course of her legal career, Stewart has defended many notorious figures, including Weather Underground bomber Kathy Boudin, Black Panther Willie Holder, and Mafia turncoat Sammy "The Bull" Gravano. She also has gone on record saying that, if given the opportunity, she would defend Osama bin Laden.
"There are a lot of people I wouldn't represent," Stewart said in an interview with the WW3 Report website. "I wouldn't represent [Charles] Schwarz, the cop who supposedly held [New York City police torture victim Abner] Louima down [in 1997]. I don't represent people who are accused of hurting children in any way, either sexually or violently. I wouldn't take a Nazi case, or an Aryan case. My politics are those of inclusion, and I hope that my politics are represented in the people I actually represent."
Stewart made national headlines in April 2002 when she was arrested for providing material support to the Islamic Group (IG), an Egypt-based terrorist organization with close links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Stewart's connections to IG date back to 1995, when, at the behest of her mentor and confidante Ramsey Clark, she represented the organization's spiritual leader, the "blind sheikh," Omar Abdel-Rahman, during his federal grand jury trial in New York City. Rahman ultimately was convicted of having helped mastermind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as well as a failed Islamic Group plan (known as "The Day of Terror") to destroy other Manhattan landmarks including the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the United Nations building, and the George Washington Bridge. For his role in these and other plots, Rahman was sentenced in October 1995 to life imprisonment plus 65 years.
The verdict against Rahman left Stewart in tears -- in large part due to the close personal relationship she had developed with her client. As a September 2002 piece in the New York Times Magazine showed, Stewart's affection for Rahman was profound:
"As Stewart got to know her new client, she came to see him as a fighter for national liberation on behalf of a people oppressed by dictatorship and American imperialism. She came to admire him personally too, for his honesty, his strength of character, his teasing humor. 'I've made up my mind,' the sheik would say. 'I'm going to marry you, and that will solve everything.' 'And what do women get if they fight in jihad?' [Stewart] would ask.'"
Their friendship, along with Stewart's counsel, continued after Rahman was imprisoned at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. Due to federal authorities' concern that Rahman might attempt to issue fatwahs (religious decrees) and to direct IG activities from prison, Stewart was required to agree to a Special Administrative Measure (SAM) stipulating that she could only talk to Rahman about legal matters, and barring her from conveying messages from the Sheikh to anyone in the outside world, including his family, friends and the media. The SAM allowed an Arabic translator, Mohammed Yousry, to accompany Stewart on her visits to the Sheikh.
Throughout 2000, FBI agents, working under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), secretly videotaped Stewart's visits with Rahman and wiretapped telephone conversations between the two. According to a 19-page indictment issued by federal agents, it was through Yousry that Rahman had delivered messages in Arabic to a Staten Island-based postal worker named Ahmed Abdel Sattar, who in turn -- via faxes and telephone conversations -- passed Rahman's messages along to IG representatives in the Middle East.
An FBI affidavit prepared by agent Kimberley Whittle detailed the measures to which Stewart had resorted during her prison visits in order to protect Rahman and assist the IG. According to the affidavit, Stewart "made random comments out loud for the [prison] guards to hear in order to conceal the real conversation" between Rahman and Yousry. During one such exchange, Stewart -- while pretending to take notes in her legal pad -- misled nearby guards by loudly inserting, into a discussion between Rahman and Yousry, the nonsensical phrase: "Yes, the um ... I am talking to you about ... him going out on a, uh, chocolate eh ... heart attack here." A subsequent wiretap captured Stewart, Rahman and Yousry joking afterwards about Stewart's deception, with Stewart saying she could "get an award for it," and the Sheikh adding, "as long as the government is using secret evidence we will use secret doves."
In mid-June of 2000, Stewart, in direct violation of the SAM, released to the international media a statement by Rahman indicating that he was "withdrawing his support for the cease-fire that currently exists." That statement signaled Islamic Group members that they should resume their violence against the Egyptian government and end a cease-fire that had been in effect since 1998. Stewart’s role in passing along this message is what ultimately led to her arrest by federal agents outside of her Brooklyn apartment in April 2002.
After Stewart's arrest, a litany of leftwing organizations and activists instantly rushed to her aid. These included Pravda; the World Socialist website; the Committee to Support Revolution in Peru (an arm of Peru's "Shining Path" rebels); International ANSWER; the National Lawyers Guild (which condemned "the witch hunt against Stewart" as "yet another attempt by the government to dismantle the Constitution and deprive fundamental rights in furtherance of the War on Terrorism"); Refuse and Resist, a group headed by Revolutionary Communist Party leader C. Clark Kissinger; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (which filed a number of amicus curiae briefs on Stewart's behalf); George Soros's Open Society Institute (which made a September 2002 grant of $20,000 to the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee); and the Center for Constitutional Rights (which issued a press release describing Stewart's indictment as "an attack on attorneys who defend controversial figures and an attempt to deprive these clients of the zealous representation that may be required").
Quickly becoming a veritable icon of the left, Stewart was invited to speak at college campuses all across the United States.
On October 6, 2002, she was a special guest speaker at an anti-war rally organized by Not In Our Name, a project of the aforementioned C. Clark Kissinger. Stewart was joined at the podium by Sami Al-Arian, the onetime North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In December 2002 Stewart was a guest of honor at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York.
On February 10, 2005, Stewart was convicted of helping Rahman communicate with his Islamic Group followers in the Middle East. She would not be sentenced until October 2006.
At an April 2005 rally at San Francisco State University, antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan publicly lauded Stewart, depicting the latter as “my human Atticus Finch,” a reference to the heroic attorney in the book To Kill a Mockingbird. Explained Sheehan: “He [Finch] did what he knew was right, but wasn’t popular. And that’s what Lynne [Stewart] is doing.”
Another ally of Stewart was Osama bin Laden, who expressed his support for the attorney via videotape.
In 2005 Stewart was a signatory to the “Statement of Conscience” crafted by the Revolutionary Communist Party-controlled Not In Our Name. This document condemned not only the Bush administration’s “stark new measures of repression,” but also its “unjust, immoral, illegitimate, [and] openly imperial policy towards the world.”
On September 24, 2005, Stewart spoke at the “Call to United Mass Action,” an anti-Iraq War rally in Washington, DC which was organized by International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice.
After Stewart's February 2005 conviction, Clinton-appointed U.S. District Court Judge John George Koeltl waited twenty months before sentencing her. In October 2006 he opted to break with guidelines that should have landed Stewart in prison for 30 years, and sentenced her to only 28 months. During the penalty hearing, Koeltl praised Stewart as someone who, throughout her career, had “performed a public service, not only to her clients, but to the nation” -- though he conceded that her actions vis a vis Rahman constituted “extraordinarily severe criminal conduct.”
Immediately after her sentence had been handed down, Stewart told an adoring crowd of supporters: "He [the judge] gave me time off for good behavior, and he gave it to me in advance of the sentence … he said that my extraordinary work meant that I could not get a sentence that the government wanted."
Stewart was slated to begin serving her prison sentence in 2006 but received numerous reprieves while seeking treatment for breast cancer. She remained free on bail pending a decision of her appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
In 2008 Stewart endorsed Cynthia McKinney's candidacy for U.S. President on the Green Party ticket. Stewart expressed her hope that a new administration in the White House might result in the overturning of her conviction:
"I think the times are more favorable -- much more skepticism and a different (I hope) view of standing against the onslaught. Who knows -- maybe a new administration would want to ditch this albatross of Ashcroft?"
On November 18, 2009, Stewart began serving her 28-month prison term. The night before her incarceration began, Stewart was interviewed on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" program. Goodman asked her: "Lynne, would you do anything differently today, or would you do anything differently back then, if you knew what you knew today?" Stewart replied:
"I think I should have been a little more savvy that the government would come after me. But do anything differently? I don’t—I’d like to think I would not do anything differently, Amy. I made these decisions based on my understanding of what the client needed, what a lawyer was expected to do. They say that you can’t distinguish zeal from criminal intent sometimes. I had no criminal intent whatsoever. This was a considered decision based on the need of the client. And although some people have said press releases aren’t client needs, I think keeping a person alive when they are in prison, held under the conditions which we now know to be torture, totally incognito—not incognito, but totally held without any contact with the outside world except a phone call once a month to his family and to his lawyers, I think it was necessary. I would do it again. I might handle it a little differently, but I would do it again."
Stewart continues to champion the causes of those whom she views as “political prisoners,” such as Mumia Abu Jamal (who murdered a Philadelphia police officer in 1981) and Leonard Peltier (who killed two FBI agents in 1975).
Among the more noteworthy public statements Stewart has made over the years are the following:
- "I don't believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence," Stewart told the New York Times in 1995. "That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support."
- In September 2002 Stewart told the New York Times Magazine that on 9/11, the Pentagon was "a better target" that the World Trade Center, because the people in the towers "never knew what hit them. They had no idea that they could ever be a target for somebody's wrath, just by virtue of being American. They took it personally. And actually, it wasn't a personal thing."
As for civilian deaths in general, Stewart said: 'I'm pretty inured to the notion that in a war or in an armed struggle, people die. They're in the wrong place, they're in a nightclub in Israel, they're at a stock market in London, they're in the Algerian outback -- whatever it is, people die.... So I have a lot of trouble figuring out why that is wrong, especially when people [such as the 9/11 hijackers] are sort of placed in a position of having no other way [to express their grievances]."
- "I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel [Castro] locking up people they see as dangerous," Stewart told Monthly Review's Susie Day in a November 2002 interview. "Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people's revolution."
- In a November 2003 interview with Susie Day, Stewart characterized America's Islamist enemies as "basically forces of national liberation." She told Day that her client, Rahman, "who was a world figure, someone who was listened to by the entire Muslim population for being a very learned scholar, deserved to have a platform, deserved not to be entombed in the middle of America and not able to speak." Added Stewart: "They [U.S. authorities] said the Sheikh was responsible for, I dunno, everything except flat feet. They made it sound like a worldwide conspiracy … He's a blind, elderly, sick man. He may be a spiritual head, he may be intellectually involved in [the Islamic Group's] struggle [in Egypt]. But he's certainly not a combatant in any sense whatsoever."
- "Don't ask me what I was doing!" Stewart said regarding the transgressions that had led to her arrest in April 2002. "Ask what the government was doing listening in!... They suckered me … I really see it all as part of the right-wing parade orchestrated by Bush and [Attorney General John] Ashcroft, which really masks their economic goals, to exploit the Third World and divert Americans' attention from the fact that our economy seems to be tanking right now. If I am the poster-child now for the anti-Ashcroft forces, I'm happy to be that."
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