Judge Refuses To Dismiss Charges Against UC Berkeley's Yoo

A federal judge in San Francisco Friday refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a former military prisoner against a Berkeley law professor who wrote legal memos that allegedly led to his harsh interrogation in a Navy brig.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White turned down a Justice Department bid for dismissal of the civil rights lawsuit filed last year by Jose Padilla, an American citizen formerly held as an enemy combatant, against John Yoo.

White wrote, "The specific designation as an enemy combatant does not automatically eviscerate all of the constitutional protections afforded to a citizen of the United States."

The decision keeps the lawsuit in place for further proceedings and a possible future trial.

Natalie Bridgeman, a lawyer for Padilla, said, "We're pleased that our client will get his day in court and the right to challenge the unconstitutional conduct to which he was subjected."

A Justice Department spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, worked in the Bush administration Justice Department from 2001 to 2003. He helped to write a series of memos, sometimes known as the "torture memos," justifying the use of extreme interrogation techniques on prisoners classified as enemy combatants.

Padilla claims Yoo's participation in those memos led to his allegedly severe abuse amounting to torture during the three years and eight months in which he was held in a Navy brig in South Carolina.

The lawsuit alleges the abuse included extreme sleep and sensory deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, forced sitting and standing in painful "stress" positions, prolonged shackling, lack of medical care and threats of being cut with a knife or killed.

Padilla, 38, was arrested in Chicago in 2002 on suspicion of participating in a radioactive "dirty bomb" plot, declared an enemy combatant and placed in solitary confinement in the Navy brig.

He was never charged in the bomb plot, but was indicted on other charges in 2005, was transferred to a federal prison and was convicted in a U.S. court in Miami in 2007 of supporting overseas jihadism. He was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison.

In a 42-page ruling, White rejected a series of Justice Department arguments for dismissal of the lawsuit, including claims that courts should not interfere in executive branch military decisions and that Yoo could not be sued for his government work.

The judge wrote, "Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct."

White, appointed a judge by President George W. Bush in 2002, also twice quoted a 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that "a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."

One memo written by Yoo in 2002 said that physical pain inflicted on prisoners did not amount to torture unless it was equivalent to the "pain accompanying serious bodily injury, such organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."

The memo was withdrawn by the Justice Department in 2004.

Yoo, 42, has been a visiting professor at Chapman University Law School in Orange County for the past semester, but will return to teaching classes at the UC Berkeley School of Law this fall, according to law school spokeswoman Susan Gluss.

Padilla's lawsuit seeks $1 in financial compensation and a court declaration that his alleged mistreatment was illegal and unconstitutional.

Padilla's mother, Estela Lebron, is also a plaintiff in the suit, claiming that she was denied virtually all contact with her son while he was in the brig.