Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner rejected this morning a plea on behalf of two suspected Jewish "terrorists," Yitzik Pass and Mati Shvo. They will thus remain in prison without permission to speak with their lawyer at least until Wednesday evening. Dorner said that she received secret information from the GSS, which persuaded her that their harsh incarceration conditions are justified. Although until now the GSS had merely stated that the two were arrested on "security charges," Dorner said that they are suspected of membership in a terrorist organization.
Atty. Naftali Wurtzberger, representing Shvo and Pass, said today that the Court has no way of judging the accuracy of the information submitted by the GSS. "It has happened often in the past that the GSS arrests people with great fanfare," he said, "and then after a while, the investigation turns up nothing and they are released with a whimper." He said that he surmises that the arrests are connected with the alleged Bat Ayin conspiracy to bomb an Arab school, and that the suspicions against his clients are being "recycled."
Yitzik Pass was about to pick up his baby daughter Shalhevet from her stroller over two years ago when a terrorist placed her in the sights of his gun and shot a bullet through her skull. The murder occurred in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood of Hevron, and the killer was standing in the Abu Sneineh section overlooking it. Pass, too, was wounded in the attack.
Wurtzberger, speaking with Arutz-7 yesterday, discussed his role in the current case:
"When the lawyer is not informed of the charges against his clients, it makes it impossible to represent them, as I have no information on which to base my arguments. This system in which the judge sees classified information that I can't see and then makes a ruling based on it turns the court hearings into something very far from the rule of law of which we hear our leaders speak with such pride every day. The law does allow the GSS to deprive the suspects of talking with their lawyer in exceptional circumstances, but the problem is that the GSS has turned this into almost a routine matter."
Wurtzberger mentioned that even when the suspects are in fact guilty, the system is problematic:
"I remember the case of Avigdor Eskin, who was kept in these harsh conditions for three full weeks - and at the end, he was in fact tried and even found guilty of some of the charges, and sat in prison for two years. But the methods used to interrogate him were simply so out of proportion to the charges of which he was found guilty that it is hard to justify them."