Urgent Action: Call for a Compassionate Release For Lynne Stewart
Update: Lynne is free! She arrived home to New York on New Year’s Day 2014. Learn more at www.lynnestewart.org
Please call Obama, Holder and the Bureau of Prisons to demand the compassionate release of people’s lawyer, Lynne Stewart.
- Attorney General Eric Holder – 1 202 514 2001
1 202 514 2001 - White House President Obama – 1 202 456 14141 202 456 1414
- B.O.P. Director Charles Samuels – 1 202 307 31981 202 307 3198 ext 3
Compassionate release would allow Lynne Stewart to access the medical care that is her only hope for survival. She is a tireless advocate for justice who doesn’t deserve to die in prison. Lynne is imprisoned on bogus charges of “material support to terrorism.” Her survival is important in its own right, and also because she is fighting to bring her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, as the first challenge to the material support for terrorism statute for its violation of freedom of speech. This is an important case and it affects the entire anti-war movement.
Background to the case:
Radical human rights attorney Lynne Stewart was falsely accused of helping terrorists. In 2002, she was arrested for material support for terrorism. Unjustly charged and convicted for the “crime” of providing her client with a fearless defense, the prosecution of Lynne Stewart is an assault upon the basic freedoms of us all. These charges were an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers, and instill fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism, seek to help Arabs and Muslims being prosecuted for speech, and defend the rights of all oppressed people.
Lynne Stewart received a 28-month sentence in October 2006. The government appealed the sentence, and in 2009 Lynne was sentence to 10 years in federal prison. She is now in a federal medical facility for women in Texas, thousands of miles away from her home, family and community.
Lynne Stewart has devoted her life to the oppressed – a constant advocate for the countless many deprived in the United States of their freedom and their rights. After years of post-conviction freedom, her bail was revoked arbitrarily and her imprisonment ordered, precluding surgery she had scheduled in a major New York hospital. The sinister meaning of the relentless persecution of Lynne Stewart is unmistakably clear: Given her age and precarious health, the ten-year sentence is a death sentence. Since her imprisonment in the Federal Prison in Carswell, Texas, her urgent need for surgery was delayed 18 months – so long, that the operating physician pronounced the condition as “the worst he had seen.” Now, breast cancer, which had been in remission prior to her imprisonment, has reached Stage Four. It has appeared in her lymph nodes, on her shoulder, in her bones and her lungs.
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
PO Box 27137
Ft. Worth, TX 76127
For more information about Lynne’s case go to http://www.lynnestewart.org