WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft cannot be sued by a former Sept. 11 detainee who claimed he was abused because of his religion and ethnicity, a sharply divided Supreme Court said Monday in a decision that could make it harder to sue top officials for the actions of low-level operatives.
The court in a 5-4 decision overturned a lower court decision that let Javaid Iqbal’s lawsuit against the high-ranking officials proceed.
Iqbal is a Pakistani Muslim who spent nearly six months in solitary confinement in New York in 2002. He had argued that although Ashcroft and Mueller did not single him out for mistreatment, they were responsible for a policy of confining detainees in highly restrictive conditions because of their religious beliefs or race.
The government argued that there was nothing linking Mueller and Ashcroft to the abuses that happened to Iqbal at a Brooklyn, N.Y., prison’s Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit, and the court agreed.
“The complaint does not show or even intimate, that petitioners purposefully housed detainees in the ADMAX SHU due to their race, religion or national origin,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion. “All it plausibly suggests is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available until the suspects could be cleared of terrorist activity.”
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had said the lawsuit could proceed.
The court’s liberal justices — David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens — dissented from the court’s opinion.
“Iqbal contends that Ashcroft and Mueller were at the very least aware of the discriminatory detention policy and condoned it and perhaps even took part in devising it,” Souter said. He should be given a chance to prove his claims in court, Souter said.
The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts. Iqbal could have a case against others, Kennedy said.
Iqbal was cleared of any involvement in terrorism and deported in January 2003, two years after his arrest.
Other Supreme Court action Monday
• The court ruled that women who worked before 1979 for companies whose maternity-leave policies meant lower pension payments cannot sue under current laws that make such policies illegal. In a case involving AT&T, the court ruled 7-2 that such policies were “bona fide” at the time and that women may not challenge them retroactively. Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. The women, Ginsburg wrote, will receive “for the rest of their lives, lower pension benefits than colleagues who worked for AT&T no longer than they did.”
• The court rejected appeals Monday from two holdout counties in Southern California that object to the state’s 13-year-old medical-marijuana law and claim it should be struck down as violating the federal drug-control act. The action probably will clear the way for patients in San Diego and San Bernardino counties to seek county-issued identification cards that show they are eligible to possess and use marijuana.
• The court agreed to hear an appeal from Conrad Black, a jailed former newspaper executive. Black was prosecuted in Chicago for allegedly skimming millions of dollars from Hollinger International and the Chicago Sun-Times to finance a lavish lifestyle. He was convicted on charges that he deprived the company and its shareholders of his “honest services,” said his attorney, Miquel Estrada. Estrada said this “vaguely worded criminal prohibition” allows prosecutors to charge corporate executives and public officials with crimes, even without proving they wrongly took money for themselves.
• The court agreed to consider a challenge to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the centerpiece of the government’s response to the watershed accounting scandals at Enron and Worldcom. The case tests the constitutionality of a nonprofit oversight board created to regulate auditors of public companies. Plaintiffs in the case allege the oversight board was endowed with unchecked government powers.
