Sentence examples for federal material from inspiring English sources
Last year, the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Kidd's attempt to hold John D. Ashcroft, the attorney general at the time, liable for alleged misuse of the statute, the federal material witness law.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Tuesday that a man detained after the Sept. 11 attacks may not sue John D. Ashcroft, the former attorney general, for asserted misuse of the federal material witness law.
But the bench was cool on Wednesday at the argument of a case testing how far the government may go in using the federal material witness law to detain and interrogate people it suspects have ties to terrorism.
About 60 other men have been held in terrorism investigations under the federal material witness law since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a coming report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Justice Antonin Scalia said that was not the case when Ashcroft and the Justice Department used the federal "material witness" statute to detain Abdullah al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen, in a terrorism investigation.
Mr. Kidd's suit contends that policies put in place by Mr. Ashcroft twisted the federal material witness law — which allows the government to arrest people with knowledge of others' crimes to make sure they are available to testify — into a preventive detention measure of the sort used abroad to hold and investigate citizens who are themselves suspected of terrorism.
The ruling, which was hailed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, was expected to reinforce the Bush administration's use of a federal material-witness statute as a tool for detaining potentially hostile witnesses in its investigation of terrorism.
The Justice Department's widespread use of the 1984 federal material-witness law to detain dozens of young Arab men after the Sept. 11 attacks has been widely criticized by legal scholars as an abuse of the law, which was intended to prevent witnesses in criminal cases from fleeing before they could testify.
Federal statutes (and all federal materials, really) are uncopyrightable, period.
Yet current budget-cutting proposals threaten to significantly reduce the number of federal plant material centers, which promote conservation best practices.
Kopp is wanted on a Federal material-witness warrant in connection with the fatal shooting of Dr. Barnett Slepian on Oct. 23, 1998, in Amherst, N.Y.
