More proof that it is unlawful to continue holding her, as the Grumbles motion her team submitted last month stated. Further imprisonment will not cause her to talk, so it is unlawful to imprison her.
In my opinion, she should be free. That being said, I don't think an emotional outburst is "more proof" (maybe you meant more evidence) that it is unlawful to hold her. Can you imagine going in from of a judge and saying "my client attempted suicide in prison, that means it's unlawful to hold her." The precedent would allow basically any prisoner who attempts suicide to be released.
The point of this kind of custody is to persuade someone to comply with the court. That the person in question would literally rather die means it isn't going to work.
Well, one wouldn't just go 'in front of a "judge"' in this case, but rather also present a long and sordid history of Chelsea's very real torture by her captors.
Chelsea has been kept in inhumane conditions which completely violate her human rights, for years. She has been very seriously tortured - physically, psychologically - by any measure.
Chelsea has had no justice. She is not a criminal, but rather a victim of a criminally corrupt military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex hell-bent on having its crimes covered up, by any and all means possible. "National Secrecy" has meant, for too long, 'our citizens will burn us to ashes if they find out what we have done'.
Secrecy corrupts. The empire will come unraveled with every secret kept, revealed.
The degree to which extremely corruptive measures (indefinite detention, 'black sites', secret courts) are taken, is indicative of just how much criminal behavior is being 'protected' by the Defense Department's lawyers ..
It is more proof that she is not being coerced into testifying by this imprisonment, meaning it is unlawful to continue imprisonment. Most prisoner are in prison to pay their debt to society, Manning is in to coerce her to testify.
He was killed. The story left the news cycle before coronavirus happened. So many rich and powerful people were close with him... I don’t think the story is coming back unless unavoidable new evidence is released.
> Can you imagine going in from of a judge and saying "my client attempted suicide in prison, that means it's unlawful to hold her." The precedent would allow basically any prisoner who attempts suicide to be released.
In order to support that point, I provided a concrete example. Jeffrey Epstein attempted to commit suicide in prison, but Jeffrey Epstein was also the exact type of person who shouldn't be freed from incarceration.
How does it prove that it's unlawful? As far as I know, the law does say that if you refuse judicial order, you will be imprisoned. If you really really really don't want to comply with a judicial order - there's no exception in the law that says "well, if you really don't want to - then it's ok, you can violate any judicial order, but only if you feel really strongly about it". The law is not about anyone's feelings. However you feel about what Manning thinks or does, it does not change the law, and by law it's certainly lawful to hold Manning until the compliance with the judicial order is achieved. That's the only way these orders can work - otherwise anybody who gets unfavorable order will just refuse them and say "no matter what you do, I will never comply so you can as well give up now".
> If you are uncoerciable, it is unlawful to imprison you for refusing the order
No, it's not. It's just a different process (criminal contempt, which is punitive, instead of civil contempt, which is coercive.)
Susan McDougal, in the Whitewater scandal, is an example of someone receiving both maximum civil contempt sanctions and subsequently being charged with criminal contempt for the same incident.
Manning has not been charged with contempt of court to my knowledge, so while there may be a legal way to imprison her the current imprisonment is illegal.
What does it mean "uncoerciable"? There's nothing particularly "uncoerciable" in Manning - we don't know the future and Manning is as human as anybody else. If this law applies to all other humans, it applies to Manning too.
Imprisonment clearly isn't enough to coerce her into complying. There may be other methods that could coerce her into it, but they would be obvious violations of the eighth Amendment.
> Imprisonment clearly isn't enough to coerce her into complying
By your logic, we should not imprison recidivist criminals, as prison is clearly not enough to deter them from further crimes. So we should just give up, shrug and release them, because apparently nothing can be done about it. In fact, if the criminal solemnly swears they'd go back to the life of crime as soon as they are released from prison, we should immediately release them as it is clear that keeping them in prison would not coerce them to comply with the law, and thus is completely pointless.
>By your logic, we should not imprison recidivist criminals, as prison is clearly not enough to deter them from further crimes.
Criminals are in prison as judgment for being convicted of their crimes. Manning is in prison to be coerced to comply with the grand jury, not as punishment for any action. This is they key difference you are missing. This isn't "my logic," this is the current law of the US, see "Grumbles motion."
Wouldn't the situation where you could just refuse any judicial order and then be set free erode the credibility of the entire judicial system in the eyes of the public? The point of contempt charge is to give teeth to judicial orders, otherwise it's just some ramblings of some random person sitting behind a desk in some fancy building, and there's no reason why anybody should listen to them. The credibility of the system, in part, rests in its ability to enforce judicial decisions.
No, I don't believe so; the whole point of a jury is to verify that a single authority figure's decision to imprison someone is not invalid.
If a judge wants someone imprisoned for a valid legal reason, they should be able to get a jury of that person's peers to agree. That's what prevents our judiciary from becoming arbitrary tool of oppression.
> the whole point of a jury is to verify that a single authority figure's decision to imprison someone is not invalid.
Juries never decided questions of authority and validity of judicial decisions. That's just not how juries work in common law.
> If a judge wants someone imprisoned for a valid legal reason, they should be able to get a jury of that person's peers to agree.
That may be your ideal picture, but again that's not how common law system works, and also not how it can work - if somebody would just refuse to comply with judicial orders, and you'd require a new jury trial each time one needs to be compelled to appear in hearing, answer a question, comply with a subpoena, etc. then you won't be able to enforce any decision and any judicial proceedings would be impossible as it would produce a fractal tree of sub-proceedings for every action, and any hostile actor would be able to bog down any proceedings by just refusing to comply with every judicial action. In actuality, there are enforcement actions in common law systems that can be performed without a jury trial. Jury trial is only necessary for conviction of a crime.
Fair enough, but I still believe that imprisonment absent a conviction or pretrial flight risk should not be allowed. I hope that in the future, we will see these sorts of situations like we see debtor's prisons today.
Another abhorrent example which shows where this leads: journalists can be unilaterally detained for not giving up their sources.
Hope she recovers quickly.