Opinion ID: 786860
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Johnson v. Eisentrager as a Bar to Jurisdiction

Text: 12 To support its contention that habeas jurisdiction does not lie with respect to the Guantanamo detainees in the Central District or any other district court of the United States, the government relies primarily on Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763, 70 S.Ct. 936, 94 L.Ed. 1255 (1950). Johnson involved a habeas petition by German enemy prisoners detained in Landsberg Prison, Germany, after being tried and sentenced to a fixed term of confinement by a U.S. Military Commission in Nanking, China for offenses committed in China subsequent to the unconditional surrender of Germany at the end of World War II. The Court declined to exercise jurisdiction, holding that the German national petitioners, tried in China for acts committed there, and confined to prison in Germany, had no right to seek a writ of habeas corpus in a United States court to test the legality of such detention. Id. at 790, 70 S.Ct. 936. 13 In connection with its holding, the Court discussed two factors: first, that the prisoners were alien enemies in a declared war, see generally id. at 769-776, 70 S.Ct. 936 (discussing the significance of alien enemy status and the reach of jurisdiction); and second, that the petitioners were detained outside any territory over the which the United States is sovereign, and the scenes of their offense, their capture, their trial and their punishment were all beyond the territorial jurisdiction of any court of the United States. Id. at 777-78, 70 S.Ct. 936; see generally id. at 777-85, 70 S.Ct. 936 (discussing the significance of extraterritorial situs, or situs outside U.S. sovereign territory, and the reach of jurisdiction). The Court explained: 14 We are cited to no instance where a court, in this or any other country where the writ is known, has issued it on behalf of an alien enemy who, at no relevant time and in no stage of his captivity, has been within its territorial jurisdiction. Nothing in the text of the Constitution extends such a right, nor does anything in our statutes. 15 399 U.S. at 768, 90 S.Ct. 2230 (emphasis added). The Johnson Court did not suggest that the mere alien enemy status of petitioners would be sufficient in itself for the denial of habeas jurisdiction; rather it emphasized that in the case of alien enemies habeas is not available when their acts and the situs of their trial and detention all lie outside of this nation's territorial jurisdiction. 8 16 The government contends that the exercise of habeas jurisdiction over Gherebi's petition is foreclosed by Johnson because the conditions that justified the Court's decision there apply equally to Gherebi and the other Guantanamo detainees. We may assume, for purposes of this appeal, that most, if not all of those being held at Guantanamo, including Gherebi, are indeed the equivalent of alien enemies, indeed enemy combatants, although we do not foreclose here Gherebi's right to challenge the validity of that assumption upon remand. The dispositive issue, for purposes of this appeal, as the government acknowledges, relates to the legal status of Guantanamo, the site of petitioner's detention. It is our determination of that legal status that resolves the question regarding the dispositive jurisdictional factor: whether or not Gherebi is being detained within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States or within its sovereign jurisdiction, as the case may be. 17 On this appeal, the government does not dispute that if Gherebi is being detained on U.S. territory, jurisdiction over his habeas petition will lie, whether or not he is an enemy alien. In Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, 63 S.Ct. 1, 87 L.Ed. 3 (1942) and In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1, 66 S.Ct. 340, 90 L.Ed. 499(1946), the Court reviewed the merits of the habeas petitions filed by enemy alien prisoners detained in U.S. sovereign (or then-sovereign) territory. In Quirin, the Court rejected on the merits the claim of enemy German petitioners held in Washington DC (and executed there) that the President was without statutory or constitutional authority to order them to be tried by a military commission for the offenses with which they were charged and had been convicted by the Commission; it then ruled that the Commission had been lawfully constituted and the petitioners lawfully tried and punished by it. 317 U.S. at 20-21, 63 S.Ct. 1. In Yamashita, the Court reviewed on the merits a similar World War II habeas claim on behalf of an enemy Japanese general, detained in the Philippines, which was U.S. territory at the time. Yamashita had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by a military commission. Following Quirin, 317 U.S. at 7-9, 63 S.Ct. 1 the Court determined that the commission had been lawfully constituted, and that petitioner was lawfully detained pursuant to his conviction and sentence. Id. at 25-26, 63 S.Ct. 1. We need not resolve the question of what constitutional claims persons detained at Guantanamo may properly allege if jurisdiction to entertain habeas claims exists. Suffice it to say that if jurisdiction does lie, the detainees are not wholly without rights to challenge in habeas their indefinite detention without a hearing or trial of any kind, and the conditions of such detention.