Lynne Stewart's Impunity

Disbarred terror lawyer Lynne Stewart was granted compassionate release from federal prison in December 2013. Her doctors argued then that her “incurable, terminal” breast cancer gave her no more than 18 months to live.

They were wrong. Eighteen months later, and Stewart is not only still alive, she's as active as ever in a variety of radical left-wing causes.

Stewart has made use of her freedom. She and her husband Ralph Poynter travel the country giving speeches to adoring left-wing audiences. Earlier this year she participated in a “Black Lives Matter” protest at Grand Central Terminal. She has rallied support for the release of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal and convicted terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera. She spoke “on a number of panels” two weeks back at John Jay College's “Left Forum.”

In May, a hale-looking Stewart gave a speech to the far-left United National Antiwar Coalition, which claims to be in a struggle against “the major perpetrator of war and injustice in the world — the United States government along with its allies and proxies.”

Though needing help mounting the stage, Stewart claimed to be “feeling fairly fit.” Her doctors, she said triumphantly, have declared that her cancer has stopped advancing. “It's not retreating, but it's not advancing,” she said.

While Stewart may not be entirely well, she hasn't lost any of her trademark anti-Americanism. In true Lynne Stewart style, she is making a mockery of the compassion offered to her by the government of the country she so detests.

As a condition of her supervised release, Stewart is forbidden to “associate with any person convicted of a felony unless granted permission to do so by [her] parole officer.” But at the UNAC speech, Stewart let slip that she regularly skirts these requirements by communicating with convicted felon Mutulu Shakur.

She began by accidentally saying she had received a letter from Shakur. She quickly corrected herself: “Actually, Ralph received the letter. I don't communicate with political prisoners because that's a part of my probation. So Ralph writes all the letters.”

The smirk on her face wasn't lost on the audience.

Stewart went on to characterize Shakur as “an acupuncturist who figured out a way to deal with heroin addiction, so of course they put him in jail.” In fact, Shakur was put on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for his involvement with the Black Liberation Army and the 1981 armed robbery of a Brinks truck at Nanuet Mall.

Brinks guard Peter Paige was killed in the attack, as were Nyack police officers Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown. Shakur and his compatriots used shotguns and an M16 rifle to kill these men, not acupuncture needles.

Stewart continues to maintain that her rather brief incarceration was entirely unjust. She believes she was a “political prisoner.” But like Shakur and the other imprisoned heroes of the radical left on whose behalf she agitates, Stewart was put in jail for what she did, not for what she believed.

In 2005, Stewart received a 28-month sentence in federal prison for providing material aid to terrorists by passing messages from her jailed client Omar Abdel-Rahman to his followers in Egypt. The government appealed that sentence — which Stewart had claimed she could do “standing on her head” — and in 2010 it was sharply increased to five years.

Rahman, the so-called blind sheik, was believed to have played a key role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He earned a life sentence in 1996 for plotting a “cataclysmic day of terror” in New York City that involved setting of five bombs in 10 minutes at the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and the building housing the FBI in lower Manhattan.

When the jury hearing Abdel-Rahman's case returned a guilty verdict, Stewart wept.

In requesting Stewart's release, U.S. attorney Preet Bharara argued that her terminal, incurable illness meant she posed a “relatively limited potential danger to the community of her release.”

That point is debatable. What's not debatable is that Lynne Stewart got an incredibly magnanimous deal from the government of the United States of America.

At the very least she could show a little gratitude.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News