Liz Cheney (yes, she’s the daughter of that Cheney) appears to believe that Guantanamo detainees with alleged ties to Al Qaeda have relinquished the right to competent and aggressive legal counsel.  Why else would she release a video suggesting that attorneys who have represented detainees should not be hired by the Justice Department?

FOX News appears to share Ms. Cheney’s views.  She wanted to know the identity of “the Al Qaeda Seven”; FOX did the research and named names. 

Is Cheney arguing that detainees should be forced to represent themselves, that they should not be defended at all, or merely that attorneys who represent detainees are like porn stars–their work may be constitutionally protected, but you wouldn’t want your boy to marry one?

The last option appears the most likely.  Cheney seems to be suggesting that while these people may have the right to minimal representation, no patriotic attorney would agree to sit beside them in a court of law.  That work should be left to desperate hacks who will take whatever work they can get.  The mere suggestion that detainees have any legal rights worth defending, in Cheney’s view, is an insult to the men and women of the armed forces.

Fortunately, not everyone in the conservative legal establishment endorses Liz Cheney’s views.  According to the New York Times, “Many conservatives, including members of the Federalist Society, the quarter-century-old policy group devoted to conservative and libertarian legal ideals, have vehemently criticized Ms. Cheney’s video, and say it violates the American legal principle that even unpopular defendants deserve a lawyer.”

One of the voices raised in protest is that of Kenneth Starr (yes, that Kenneth Starr).  I mention this only because Mr. Starr was recently named president of Baylor University.  Since Friends of Justice has two Baylor professors on its board (law professor, Mark Osler, and sociology professor, Lydia Bean), and since four Baylor law students are currently working as Friends of Justice interns, we have more than a passing interest in the institution.  Although Starr has been a pariah to those on the ideological Left, he has a reputation, among those who know him well, as a charming individual and an irenic conservative.

It is nice to know that liberals and most conservatives can agree on the fundamental tenets of the American criminal justice system: including the idea that all defendants, be they ever so nasty, must be defended competently and aggressively.  They may not “deserve” a quality defense; but justice demands that they receive it.