1 week Ago
This was a man who headed a political movement of more than a quarter-million Hoosiers and who expected Gov. Ed Jackson to select him for an open U.S.
Senate seat. Stephenson was plotting a Republican campaign for the White House in 1928. But by the end of 1925, Stephenson had been convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Madge Olberholtzer, a young Statehouse clerk.
Stephenson was the conspicuous beneficiary of a legal concept known as due process. His lawyers successfully moved the trial from Indianapolis to Noblesville, a KKK redoubt that had hosted a 12,000-member Klan rally the previous year. Stephenson’s legal team had attempted to quash Oberholtzer’s deathbed declaration from admitted evidence.
But her ghostly testimony persuaded a jury of 10 farmers and two businessmen to convict Stephenson. Stephenson’s murder conviction prompted the political collapse of the Klan. I invite you to revisit the Stephenson case in the context of the American rule of law — specifically, due process — in the recent case involving a Maryland resident, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to a terrorist prison in El Salvador on March 12.
Garcia was accused of being a gang member (apparently due to a Chicago Bulls baseball cap and a tattoo on his arm). He was denied due process. President Donald Trump’s administration has refused to bring him back to the United States.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled last week that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return to the States.
The justices voted 7-2 this past weekend to halt another flight of prisoners to El Salvador. At this writing, Trump appears to be defying the Supreme Court. On Truth Social, Trump criticized court proceedings around immigration, saying it would take “many years of long and tedious trials to fly each and every one of them back home.
” Without due process, an “invader” is anybody Trump declares as such. Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS Feed | SoundStack | All Of Our Podcasts By contrast, there was another future U.S.
president — John Adams — who so truly believed in the rule of law and due process that he gave legal counsel to British soldiers accused of slaughtering American patriots in the Boston Massacre in 1770. “Better that many guilty persons escape unpunished than one innocent person should be punished.” In Indiana, due process refers to the constitutional guarantee that the government must respect a person’s rights to life, liberty or property and that no person shall be deprived of these rights without proper legal procedures.
Arrested individuals have a right to due process, including notice of charges, a fair and speedy trial, the right to present a defense and the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. What about people like Garcia, who acknowledged he entered the U.S.
illegally in 2011? The U.S. Supreme Court ruled over 100 years ago that the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment guarantees constitutional protections to noncitizens, ruling that “even aliens shall not be .
.. deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
” In a 2014 joint interview with journalist Marvin Kalb, then-Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia were asked about immigrants’ rights. Do they apply to undocumented immigrants? “Oh, I think so. I think anybody who’s present in the United States has protections under the United States Constitution,” Scalia said.
Federal Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, fleshed out what’s at stake with the Garcia dilemma: “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all.
The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” Wilkinson asks.
Trump was elected last November partly due to his popular stance on immigration. The Garcia case could undermine Trump’s overall mission on the issue. I grew up — we all grew up — in an America where we didn’t have to fear that knock on the door in the dead of night.
Or watch our parents disappear into the custody of the state. We didn’t fear what occurred to 61 million citizens of the former Soviet Union who ended up in graves after the deprivation of rights. Or those dissidents in Argentina and Chile who ended up floating in rivers following the government takeover by despots.
A century ago, Hoosiers heard the leader of a shadow government claim, “I am the law.” Today, we must fight once more to protect the concepts of due process and the rule of law, or risk an erosion of liberty..
