Washington, DC, September 20, 2001 — The National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA), along with fellow members of the In Defense of Freedom Coalition, urges lawmakers to move with extreme caution in expanding governmental powers or curtailing individual freedoms in response to the devastating attacks on September 11.

Responses to the attacks should be narrowly tailored to specific identified dangers and shortcomings in existing laws and the process of careful legislative hearings and deliberation should not be short-circuited, the Association urged. If it is, measures should contain sunset provisions, to force more careful review before reauthorization.

"Our hearts go out to the thousands of innocent victims and their families and loved ones, including many in our own legal services community," said NLADA President and CEO Clint Lyons. "America’s justice system and legal services community stands for fairness. Speaking for NLADA, I believe we not only honor the memories of our fellow citizens by bringing the guilty to justice, but also by not compounding the injustice of this act of terror by wrongly targeting individuals in a criminal justice system stripped of fundamental and traditional checks and balances."

One of the many proposals voiced by lawmakers is to do away with the right to counsel, the presumption of innocence and trial by jury for people suspected of complicity in last week’s attacks. "Suspending constitutional rights for people arrested and tried in this country, such as the right to counsel or the presumption of innocence, because of the extreme barbarity of the offense, sets an extraordinarily troubling precedent," said Lyons. "We would be forgetting that at times of national outrage, the danger of hasty and erroneous arrests is at its highest." NLADA believes that whatever action the country chooses by way of military response to an act of war by a foreign power, as U.S. citizens we should not destroy our domestic system of constitutional justice, with its carefully balanced safeguards against unfounded criminal convictions and oppressive targeting of unpopular groups.

"History teaches us that such expansions of governmental power come largely at the expense of low-income communities and people of color," said Lyons. "Our concerns in this regard are only intensified by the growing awareness of examples of law enforcement reliance on racial profiling, and the wave of intolerance and hate crimes that these attacks already have unleashed."

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The National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA), founded in 1911, is the oldest and largest national, nonprofit membership organization devoting all of its resources to advocating equal access to justice for all Americans. NLADA champions effective legal assistance for people who cannot afford counsel, serves as a collective voice for both civil legal services and public defense services throughout the nation and provides a wide range of services and benefits to its individual and organizational members.