Republican Judge Takes Aim at Bush Terror Policies

Republican Judge Takes Aim at Bush Terror Policies: "Republican Judge Takes Aim at Bush Terror Policies
by Gail Appleson


NEW YORK - Far from the typical corporate Christmas card, a former U.S. federal judge's law firm is embracing controversy with holiday cards showing the historic Supreme Court session where he sucessfully challenged the Bush administration's treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees.


John Gibbons
Even more unusually, the attorney who argued the case before the nation's highest court is a Republican and former federal appeals judge appointed by President Richard Nixon.

'Human rights issues are not Republican or Democratic issues,' said John Gibbons, whose arguments led to the Supreme Court's landmark June ruling that foreign terror suspects held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba can have access to U.S. courts.

Gibbons, a former chief judge of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, told Reuters that he has never heard criticism of his fight for detainee rights from other lawyers, regardless of their party affiliation.

'I don't know any organized bar group that has taken the position that the government is right. I think most lawyers probably think the government has gone crazy,' he said.

Certainly this soft-spoken former jurist, who takes long thoughtful pauses before answering questions, is no rabble-rouser. Gibbons is a devoutly religious man of conviction, his colleagues say, who time and again has put himself on the line when he thinks a wrong needs righting.

The strong human interest views held by Gibbons and his Newark, N.J.-based corporate law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione have led the former judge and his colleagues, who usually handle business matters, to become involved in a range of controversial cases.

These have led the lawyers to take on such causes as fighting for the rights of sex offenders and challenging death penalty sentences.

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