PROSECUTORS USE TERRORISM LAW ON COMMON CRIMES

Today's Topic -- USA Patriot Act

PHILADELPHIA - In the two years since law enforcement agencies gained fresh
powers to help them track down and punish terrorists, police and
prosecutors have increasingly turned the force of the new laws not on
al-Qaida cells but on people charged with common crimes.

The Justice Department said it has used authority given to it by the USA
Patriot Act to crack down on currency smugglers and seize money hidden
overseas by alleged bookies, con artists and drug dealers.

Federal prosecutors used the act in June to file a charge of "terrorism
using a weapon of mass destruction" against a California man after a pipe
bomb exploded in his lap, wounding him as he sat in his car.

A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a
methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture
of chemical weapons. If convicted, the man could get 12 years to life in
prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.

Prosecutor Jerry Wilson says he isn't abusing the law, which defines
chemical weapons of mass destruction as "any substance that is designed or
has the capability to cause death or serious injury" and contains toxic
chemicals.

Civil liberties and legal defense groups are bothered by the string of
cases and say the government soon will be routinely using harsh
anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.

"Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was
conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to
extend them beyond terror cases," said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the
National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys.

Prosecutors aren't apologizing.

Attorney General John Ashcroft completed a 16-city tour last week defending
the Patriot Act as key to preventing a second catastrophic terrorist
attack. Federal prosecutors have brought more than 250 criminal charges
under the law, with more than 130 convictions or guilty pleas.

The law, passed two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, erased many
restrictions that had barred the government from spying on its citizens,
granting agents new powers to use wiretaps, conduct electronic and computer
eavesdropping and access private financial data.

Stefan Cassella, deputy chief for legal policy for the Justice Department's
asset forfeiture and money laundering section, said that while the Patriot
Act's primary focus was on terrorism, lawmakers were aware it contained
provisions that had been on prosecutors' wish lists for years and would be
used in a wide variety of cases.

In one case prosecuted this year, investigators used a provision of the
Patriot Act to recover $4.5 million from a group of telemarketers accused
of tricking elderly U.S. citizens into thinking they had won the Canadian
lottery. Prosecutors said the defendants told victims they would receive
their prize as soon as they paid thousands of dollars in income tax on
their winnings.

Before the anti-terrorism act, U.S. officials would have had to use
international treaties and appeal for help from foreign governments to
retrieve the cash, deposited in banks in Jordan and Israel. Now, they
simply seized it from assets held by those banks in the United States.

The complaint that anti-terrorism legislation is being used to go after
people who aren't terrorists is just the latest in a string of criticisms.

More than 150 local governments have passed resolutions opposing the law as
an overly broad threat to constitutional rights.

Critics also say the government has gone too far in charging three U.S.
citizens as enemy combatants, a power presidents wield during wartime that
is not part of the Patriot Act. The government can detain such individuals
indefinitely without allowing them access to a lawyer.

Some of the restrictions on government surveillance that were erased by the
Patriot Act had been enacted after past abuses -- including efforts by the
FBI to spy on civil rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators during the
Cold War. Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the
Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said it isn't far fetched to
believe that the government might overstep its bounds again. "I don't think
that those are frivolous fears," Lynch said. "We've already heard stories
of local police chiefs creating files on people who have protested the
(Iraq) war ... The government is constantly trying to expand its
jurisdictions, and it needs to be watched very, very closely."