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Damon Key Serves the Public - Lyon Arboretum

Damon Key's attorneys, staff, friends and families donated their Saturday on a wonderful community service project at Manoa's Lyon Arboretum.

The University of Hawai'i’s Lyon Arboretum and Botanical Garden is creating one of Hawaii’s first sustainable gardens. The Arboretum consists of almost 200 acres used for research and community education. The Ulu garden has been designed to educate homeowners on ways to create beautiful and environmentally friendly urban spaces. It will feature environmental concepts such as storm water bioswale and water catchment. Ulu will also involve native plant conservation, cultural, medicinal and edible gardens and composting.

Damon Key is celebrating its 50th Anniversary and dedicated its time to this project in honor of the legacy of public service created by our Founders and continued for the last five decades.

Universal Crimes, Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and an Educational Conference in North Carolina?

So, apparently I'm not the only person to get emails offering Canadian pharmaceuticals or random free stuff.  The federal government is not above the email ruse to bring an alleged pirate to justice.

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit just handed down a decision upholding the prosecution of an alleged Somali pirate or pirate-helper. The case is United States v. Ali.

Per the opinion:  

Ali Mohamed Ali, a Somali national, helped negotiate the ransom of a merchant vessel and its crew after they were captured by marauders in the Gulf of Aden. Though he claims merely to have defused a tense situation, the government believes he was in cahoots with these brigands from the very start. Ali eventually made his way to the United States, where he was arrested and indicted for conspiring to commit and aiding and abetting two offenses: piracy on the high seas and hostage taking.

The government says Ali is a pirate; he protests that he is not. Though a trial will determine whether he is in fact a pirate, the question before us is whether the government’s allegations are legally sufficient. And the answer to that question is complicated by a factor the district court deemed critical: Ali’s alleged involvement was limited to acts he committed on land and in territorial waters—not upon the high seas. Thus, the district court restricted the charge of aiding and abetting piracy to his conduct on the high seas and dismissed the charge of conspiracy to commit piracy. Eventually, the district court also dismissed the hostage taking charges, concluding that prosecuting him for his acts abroad would violate his right to due process. On appeal, we affirm dismissal of the charge of conspiracy to commit piracy. We reverse, however, the district court’s dismissal of the hostage taking charges, as well as its decision to limit the aiding and abetting piracy charge.

Piracy is a universal crime, which under international and U.S. law, subjects the offenders to worldwide jurisdiction.  Practically speaking, this means that a Somali pirate faces the same prosecution for his conduct in the Gulf of Aden as if he committed the acts in San Francisco Bay.

Piracy is a very old crime and there is a dearth of case law analyzing the due process issues associated with these prosecutions.   As such, every opinion with universal criminal jurisdiction tends to cite United States v. Yunis, 924 F.2d 1086 (D.C. Cir. 1991)(aircraft piracy) and, of more recent vintage, United States v. Shi, 525 F. 3d 709 (9th Cir. 2008)(as the court noted, Shi is technically not a piracy case, but it did involve violence in the maritime realm)(posted here).

Apparently Mr. Ali was not just a pirate-helper, but was also the self-proclaimed Director Generatl of the Ministry of Education for the Republic of Somaliland.  The federal government invited him to attend an education conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.  He was arrested at Dulles International Airport enroute to that conference.  "Little did he know it was all an elaborate ruse."

The Passing of a Coast Guard Legend - Ray Evans

In the annals of Coast Guard history, the Coast Guardsman most known for heroism is Douglas Munro who died rescuing Marines at Guadalcanal.  He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor and has a cutter and building named after him.

Another Guadalcanal hero was Munro's friend, Ray Evans.  Commander Evans was awarded the Navy Cross  He died this year and was laid to rest yesterday.

 

 

He was interviewed about that day at Guadalcanal and I've included the text of that day below:

I recall a major came down and a battalion major came down and I don't remember his name [Major Ortho L. Rodgers, USMC] I don't think I ever knew his name really.  He, he talked to Dexter and the next thing I know, the commander is telling us that Doug and I -- that they were going to send this battalion, I guess it was a battalion of Marines, to land umm at Point Cruz.  As I understood the situation, they had tried to cross the Matanikau River. And the Japanese were well entrenched on the other side of the river and they [the Marines] couldn't get across.  So they sent a contingent up into the mountain, across the back of 'em to get behind them. And the, and the plan was to send these by water four miles across and land them at Point Cruz behind the Matanikau River, beyond it, and, and get them in a pincer movement.

Ahh, and so they came; we loaded up a, I don't know, ah ten or twelve infantry boats, and five or six tank lighters and under covering fire from the destroyer [U.S.S.] Ballard [AVD-10] made an amphibious landing.  Umm, unfortunately, we were supposed to land at the head of the cove and we found the coral would not allow us to do that so we had to make an abrupt right turn and land on the beach.  At the side.  And we warned the major that immediately after they left the boat he should have his men make an immediate left and go to the head of the, to to follow their plan. But unfortunately he caught a mortar immediately after he got off the boat and he never gave that order.  So they went up the wrong hill and the wrong place right into the Japanese and eventually they ran past the Japanese lines and then had to fight their way back through it to get to the beach.  

In the meantime, all our boats had gone back to the base except the major had requested we leave one boat behind, for immediate casualties.  And so I stayed, I elected to stay behind and I had a coxswain named Sam Roberts from Portland, and the two of us were laying to in this LCP.  Unfortunately, we laid too close to the beach and the Japanese fired an automatic weapon at us and hit Roberts, hit all the controls, the vacuum controls on the boat. I slammed it into "full-ahead" and we tore out of there and I tore back to the, to the base, four miles, and when I got to the base, I pulled it out of gear, but it wouldn't come out of gear, so we ran up on the beach, which is a long sloping sand beach.  Ran up on the beach the full length of the boat before it stopped. 

Umm, and Roberts unfortunately, they got him in an evacuation plane to New Hebrides, and he died on the way, very sad.  Then, no sooner had that happened then word came down that they [the Marine landing force] had to be evacuated.  And so back we go.  And this time, Doug said, we had two air-cooled Louis machine guns between us, with rotary drums if you remember, you've seen that kind, so we elected to stay on one boat with the two guns and act as kind of a covering fire, while we sent the rest of the boats in to load these people.  And they had lost a, I think they had twenty-five casualties and then they had about twenty-five that were wounded, and we got all the wounded and all the all the rest of them off and, the last tank lighter load started out to sea and we followed him and found one tank lighter around the point was stuck on the beach and couldn't get off.  So we sent that tank lighter with us in to tow him off and we acted as covering again.  And we were having no fire from beach whatsoever.  It was relatively easy.  And he got him off and both the tank lighters headed off to sea and we headed out to sea behind him.  And I saw that, and Doug was facing forward, and I was standing up by the coxswain looking back, I saw this line of waterspouts coming across the water, and I yelled at Doug to get down, he couldn't hear me over the engine noise, and it hit him.  It was one burst of fire.  And that's how he died.  And that's how it happened.