Word: bail
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...That would turn out to be the high-water mark of the government's three-year pursuit of Wen Ho Lee. Before Christmas, prosecutors asked Federal Judge James Parker to deny Lee bail and hold him in solitary confinement before trial, lest he somehow communicate to allies or foreign governments how to find the missing tapes or destroy evidence. The government based its plea on testimony from the FBI's chief investigator in the case, Robert Messemer, who said Lee had engaged in a pattern of deceit, misled the government about his contacts with Chinese officials and written letters seeking...
...esque tale (replete with a law enforcement officer who lied shamelessly to the court) of a man held in solitary confinement for nine months to force him to confess a crime. Even President Clinton has slammed his attorney general's handling of the case, saying denying Wen Ho Lee bail and keeping him in solitary confinement as a threat to national security was rendered unjustified by the plea agreement the government accepted...
...happy, but it shouldn't make the public happy." After all, he argues, if Lee was guilty of the original charges, then he shouldn't have been released, but if he's guilty only of the felony cited in the plea agreement, then he should never have been denied bail in the first place - in other words, Dershowitz accused the Justice Department of denying Lee bail as a means of pressuring him into a guilty plea...
...feds will make the case that the plea agreement gives them what they most needed from Lee - his cooperation in accounting for the seven missing tapes of highly classified material he downloaded. Lee's detention without bail in solitary confinement had long been explained as a hardball strategy to force the supposedly recalcitrant scientist to cooperate with the investigation. But the fact that the agreement comes after a number of courtroom setbacks for the government - the most disturbing of which was the recent admission by an FBI agent that he'd provided false testimony in Lee's bail hearing...
ORDERED RELEASED ON BAIL. WEN HO LEE, 60, fired Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist suspected by the FBI of espionage in smuggling U.S. nuclear secrets to China; by a federal judge's decision; after eight months' solitary confinement in a Santa Fe, N.M., prison. Judge James Parker ruled that the case for holding Lee as a security threat until his Nov. 6 trial was unpersuasive. Lee must still meet $1 million bail and be stringently monitored at his home...