Whatever Happened To That Sept. 29 Deadline?
I got an e-mail from Zuhair the other day. It was the first in a while; a family emergency called him back to Jordan in the last weeks of September, and I’d heard nothing from him since. Apparently he’d heard almost as little from the courts on the status of his case.
With his permission, I’m passing along his e-mail verbatim to y’all.
On Wednesday, October 24, 2007, the court issued a sealed ex parte order, presumably to the government (there are only two of us in this case). Since the order is sealed, no one can see it, and since it’s ex parte (meaning one or more of the parties (me) is excluded (click on the word for a precise definition)), I won’t know what it is. I was told by the docketing clerk, who was very tight lipped (as she is required to be) that “Judge Miller’s chamber has already been in contact with the concerned party. No further action was required on [my] part.” It’s worth noting that no one has been in contact with me.
Ex parte orders and filings are not common in a civil case and tend to be used more in criminal cases. The point of an ex parte filing is to provide the court with something (or ask the court for something) which, if the other party knew about, may cause them to run away or destroy evidence which may be critical to the case. Ex parte filings are used for restraining orders and search warrants (for example). My hunch is that since the government filed documents under seal earlier last month, the court may have wanted something specific related to the filed material. If the Court publicly issued the order, it may compromise the seal under which the filed documents were put. Whether that is really the case, and what that something is, I shall never know – not now anyway.
I’ll keep you updated as I know more. In the mean time, I hope to be back in the US before November (as soon as I find a flight out).
For once, I have no snark to add to this. Things are proceeding according to schedule, I suppose. I retain hope that we will see justice done in this case–eventually–and that Zuhair is able to return very soon to the country of which he hopes to be a citizen.