www.wenholee.org/Parkerapology.html
District Court, New Mexico, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, at Wen Ho Lee's plea hearing. In my opinion, you have been punished harshly, both by the severe conditions of pretrial confinement and by the fact that you have lost valuable rights as a citizen. Under the laws of our country, a person charged in federal court with commission of a crime normally is entitled to be released from jail until that person is tried and convicted. Congress expressed in the Bail Reform Act its distinct preference for pretrial release from jail and prescribed that release on conditions be denied to a person charged with a crime only in exceptional circumstances. The Executive Branch of the United States Government has until today actually, or just recently, vigorously opposed your release from jail, even under what I had previously described as Draconian conditions of release. During December 1999, the then-United States Attorney, who has since resigned, and his Assistants presented me, during the three-day hearing between Christmas and New Year's Day, with information that was so extreme it convinced me that releasing you, even under the most stringent of conditions, would be a danger to the safety of this nation. The then-United States Attorney personally argued vehemently against your release and ultimately persuaded me not to release you. Lee must remain in custody, the Court urges the government attorneys to explore ways to lessen the severe restrictions currently imposed upon Dr. After December, your lawyers developed information that was not available to you or them during December. And I ordered the Executive Branch of the government to provide additional information that I reviewed, a lot of which you and your attorneys have not seen. With more complete, balanced information before me, I felt the picture had changed significantly from that painted by the government during the December hearing. Hence, after the August hearing, I ordered your release despite the continued argument by the Executive Branch, through its government attorneys, that your release still presented an unacceptable extreme danger. I find it most perplexing, although appropriate, that the Executive Branch today has suddenly agreed to your release without any significant conditions or restrictions whatsoever on your activities. I note that this has occurred shortly before the Executive Branch was to have produced, for my review in camera, a large volume of information that I previously ordered it to produce. From the beginning, the focus of this case was on your motive or intent in taking the information from the secure computers and eventually downloading it on to tapes. There was never really any dispute about your having done that, only about why you did it. What I believe remains unanswered is the question: What was the government's motive in insisting on your being jailed pretrial under extraordinarily onerous conditions of confinement until today, when the Executive Branch agrees that you may be set free essentially unrestricted? A corollary question I guess is: Why were you charged with the many Atomic Energy Act counts for which the penalty is life imprisonment, all of which the Executive Branch has now moved to dismiss and which I just dismissed? With respect to that, I quote from a transcript of the August 15, 2000, hearing, where I asked this question. We know that there was a meeting at the White House the Saturday before the indictment, which was attended by the heads of a number of agencies. I believe the number two and number three persons in the Department of Justice were present. I don't know if the Attorney General herself was present. The second thing that I was told was that the decision to prosecute you on the 39 Atomic Energy Act, each of which had life imprisonment as a penalty, was made personally by the President's Attorney General. Attorneys, a very fine attorney in this case -- this was also at the August 15 hearing. This is talking about materials that I ordered to be produced in connection with Dr. The first category of materials involved the January 2000 report by the Department of Energy Task Force on racial profiling. Lee, you're a citizen of the United States and so am I, but there is a difference between us. You had to study the Constitution of the United States to become a citizen. Most of us are citizens by reason of the simple serendipitous fact of our birth here. So what I am now about to explain to you, you probably already know from having studied it, but I will explain it anyway. Under the Constitution of the United States, there are three branches of government. There is the Executive Branch, of which the President of the United States is the head. The President operates the Executive Branch with his cabinet, which is composed of secretaries or heads of the different departments of the Executive Branch. In this prosecution, the more important members of the President's cabinet were the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Department of Energy, both of whom were appointed to their positions by the President. The Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice, which despite its title, is a part of the Executive Branch, not a part of the Judicial Branch of our government. The United States Marshal Service, which was charged with overseeing your pretrial detention, also is a part of the Executive Branch, not the Judicial Branch. The Executive Branch has enormous power, the abuse of which can be devastating to our citizens. The second branch of our national government is the Legislative Branch, our Congress. Congress promulgated the laws under which you were prosecuted, the criminal statutes. And it also promulgated the Bail Reform Act, under which in hindsight you should not have been held in custody. The Judicial Branch of government, of which I am a member, is called the Third Branch of government because it's described in Article III of our Constitution. Judges must interpret the laws and must preside over criminal prosecutions brought by the Executive Branch. Since I am not a member of the Executive Branch, I cannot speak on behalf of the President of the United States, the Vice-president of the United States, their Attorney General, their Secretary of the Department of Energy or their former United States Attorney in this District, who vigorously insisted that you had to be kept in jail under extreme restrictions because your release pretrial would pose a grave threat to our nation's security. I want everyone to know that I agree, based on the information that so far has been made available to me, that you, Dr. Lee, faced some risk of conviction by a jury if you were to have proceeded to trial. Because of that, I decided to accept the agreement you made with the United States Executive Branch under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Further, I feel that the 278 days of confinement for your offense is not unjust; I am truly sorry that I was led by our Executive Branch of government to order your detention last December. Lee, I tell you with great sadness that I feel I was led astray last December by the Executive Branch of our government through its Department of Justice, by its Federal Bureau of Investigation and by its United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico, who held the office at that time. I am sad for you and your family because of the way in which you were kept in custody while you were presumed under the law to be innocent of the charges the Executive Branch brought against you. I am sad that I was induced in December to order your detention, since by the terms of the plea agreement that frees you today without conditions, it becomes clear that the Executive Branch now concedes, or should concede, that it was not necessary to confine you last December or at any time before your trial. I am sad because the resolution of this case drug on unnecessarily long. Before the Executive Branch obtained your indictment on the 59 charges last December, your attorney, Mr. Holscher, made a written offer to the Office of the United States Attorney to have you explain the mi...
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