Supreme Court Rejects War Powers Case

A divided Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from a man held until recently as an enemy combatant without traditional legal rights, in effect sidestepping a challenge to the Bush administration's wartime detention powers.

Jose Padilla was moved in January to Miami to face criminal charges, and the Bush administration urged the court to stay out of the case, CBS News correspondent Barry Bagnato reports. The government argued that the appeal over his indefinite detention was now pointless.

Three justices said the court should have agreed to take up the case anyway: Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

An appeals court panel had all but called for the court to deal with the case, saying it was troubled by the Bush administration's change in legal strategy, after holding Padilla more than three years without charges.

"This is a victory for the White House, which took the steam out of this case several months ago when it changed Padilla's status from that of combatant to that of a regular criminal defendant," CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen says.

Justices first considered in 2004 whether Padilla's constitutional rights were violated when he was detained as an "enemy combatant" without charges and access to a lawyer. Justices dodged a decision on technical grounds. In a dissent Justice John Paul Stevens said then that "at stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society."

Stevens and two other court members, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, explained their Monday votes not to deal with Padilla's case.

Although Padilla's claims "raise fundamental issues respecting the separation of powers, including consideration of the role and function of the courts, (the case) also counsels against addressing those claims when the course of legal proceedings has made them, at least for now, hypothetical," Kennedy wrote for the three.

"A lot of people on all sides of this fight were hoping the Court would step in and answer the question of what the president could do or not do to these so-called enemy combatants," Cohen said.

"That clarity is not going to happen and the ambiguity helps the White House, which now can hold indefinitely and without charges another U.S. citizen without having to worry about any restrictions from the justices," Cohen added.

Justices are reviewing a second case arising from the government pursuit of terrorists, an appeal by a foreign terrorist suspect facing a military commission on war crimes charges at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Arguments were last week.

Padilla's case was different. It asked the court to clarify how far the government can go when its hunt for terrorists leads to Americans in this country.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member and a convert to Islam, was arrested in 2002 after a trip to Pakistan. The government alleged at the time that he was part of a plot to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" in the United States.

The Bush administration has maintained since 2002 that it had the power to detain him without charges. However, in an abrupt change in strategy, the government late last year brought criminal charges against Padilla.

The charges do not match the long-standing allegations that Padilla sought to blow up apartment buildings. Instead, he was charged with being part of a North American terrorism cell that raised funds and recruited fighters to wage violent jihad outside the United States.

"The executive branch maneuvered this result deftly," Cohen says.

The strategy shift angered a panel of 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., which had ruled last September that Padilla's constitutional rights had not been violated by his detention.

Judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative who was named to the bench by President Bush's father, wrote in a decision late last year that the administration's actions left the impression that Padilla had been held in military custody "by mistake."

Ginsburg said Monday that although Padilla is charged in civilian court "nothing prevents the executive (branch) from returning to the road it earlier constructed and defended."

"This case, here for the second time, raises a question 'of profound importance to the nation,'" she wrote.

Padilla pleaded innocent in Florida to the criminal charges and is scheduled to be put on trial this fall. A federal judge refused to set bail for Padilla after a prosecutor said he had a history of arrests and convictions for violent crimes including murder as a juvenile.

The case is Padilla v. Hanft, 05-533.