WPCNR WHITE PLAINS LAW JOURNAL. From Center for Judicial Accountability. (Edited)December 22, 2004:  As exclusively reported for the last six months only by The White Plains CitizeNetReporter,  the jail term of  White Plains own Elena Ruth Sassower, Coordinator and Cofounder of the Center for Judicial Accountability in the city, ends Thursday.

She returns home to White Plains today upon her scheduled release from spending six months in the District of Columbia Jail at 1901 E Street, SE Washington DC. for conviction of a non-violent, non-felony "Disruption of Congress" charge. Ms. Sassower has been in jail since June 28.

BREAK OUT THE YELLOW RIBBONS. Elena Sassower comes home today. Photo, Courtesy, Center for Judicial Accountability.

The charge was based on Ms. Sassower’s 23-word question posed on the adjournment of a May 22, 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee Public Hearing, which upon utterance caused Chairman of the Committee Saxby Chambliss to direct DC Capitol Police to arrest her.

That question was:   Mr. Chairman, there is citizen opposition to Judge Wesley based on his documented corruption as a New York Court of Appeals judge. May I testify?”

To the Dungeon With Her.

Ms. Sassower was removed from the Meeting Room, handcuffed, arrested, and incarcerated incommunicado for 21 hours before she was brought before a Magistrate, charged with “Disruption of Congress.”

Sassower was there that day to protest the appointment of Judge Wesley, one of five judicial nominees of President Bush, whose nominations were before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Wesley’s was a lifetime appointment to a federal judgeship on the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which reviews federal district court appeals, including from New York. All five were recommended for confirmation at a two hour hearing dubbed by the Center for Judicial Accountability as a  “rubber stamp” hearing.

Ms. Sassower’s voice was  the lone voice expressed in intended opposition.

Doris L. Sassower, Cofounder and Director of the Center, says of her daughter’s prison stay, “It’s a police state mentality that would permit a law-abiding public advocate like Elena to be arrested here in America, convicted, and jailed for six months for respectfully asking to testify in opposition to proposed governmental action at a Congressional public hearing. That’s what the First Amendment was designed to protect. Such facts required dismissal of the criminal case.”

George McDermott, a citizens’ rights activist, former Congressional candidate, and member of the press, who attended Ms. Sassower’s trial, said he “never saw anything so unfair in my life” and “could not believe he was in an American courtroom.”

 The internationally known D.C. law firm of Lewin & Lewin is representing Ms. Sassower pro bono and will be filing an appeal from her conviction in the D.C. Court of Appeals.   

Only two other newspapers in the country reported on Ms. Sassower's plight  after the CitizeNetReporter. 

One was The Philadelphia Inquirer. Reporters were discouraged by the jail from interviewing Ms. Sassower. Major television network news departments ignored the story.

The New York Times only recently did a story and reported the sequence of the incident incorrectly, with a tone that said in effect, Ms. Sassower had it coming because she was such a gadfly.