Mike Trinh
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Mike Trinh | |
| Occupation | Attorney |
|---|---|
| Website http://www.orrick.com |
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Mike Trinh is a lawyer from the San Francisco Bay area.[1] He is notable for volunteering to represent a captive held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.
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[edit] Early life
Trinh's family are former refugees from Vietnam, who both work as software developers.[1] Trinh was born and grew up in Washington, D.C. and Raleigh, North Carolina. Trinh's undergraduate degree, from the University of North Carolina, is also in software engineering. His law degree is from Georgetown Law School. Upon graduation, in 2005, he moved to San Francisco to work for the law firm of Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe. Trinh was hired to specialize in intellectual property litigation.
Trinh described that while studying at Georgetown many of his fellow students were law enforcement and intelligence establishment professionals, returning to study to get a law degree. Among the fields he studied was National Security law. At Georgetown he studied under Viet D. Dinh, an author of the USA PATRIOT Act.[1]
[edit] Guantanamo clients
An article about Trinh, in the San Francisco Chronicle detailed difficulties Trinh experienced in contacting his client.[1]
Trinh explained why he volunteered to defend a Guantanamo captives who might not have turned out to be innocent[1]:
"It's a bedrock of our legal system that you get due process. Whatever the charge is -- from petty theft to murder one -- you get a hearing, you know the facts against you, you see your accuser."
Trinh has been able to meet his client, Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, a young Yemeni, three times.[1] However, he still doesn't know the circumstances of his capture, because after years of interrogation, a Guantanamo captive is likely to clam up under direct questioning. Some Guantanamo captives have reported that interrogators have met with captives, pretending to be their lawyers, in attempts to trick them into confessions.
Awad told Trinh he had been injured, while shopping in a bazaar, that was bombed during the American aerial bombardment of Afghanistan, and was captured from a hospital bed where he was recovering from having his foot amputated.[1]
Prior to taking on Awad Trinh had helped prepare one of the amicus briefs submitted to Supreme Court of the United States when it considered Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The brief Trinh worked on compared the Bush Presidency's treatment of captives apprehended in Afghanistan with the treatment of the pirates apprehended by the United States Navy during the Barbary Wars in the early 19th century[1]:
"One of the first examples of American military action abroad was sending a squadron of frigates to quell the pirates in the Mediterranean. The pirates, like terrorists, didn't obey the customary laws of war. They never wore uniforms, or would wear fake uniforms. Despite this, the founders still gave them tribunals under international norms and treaties that applied at the time. The thought that you can throw out the Constitution or that it can't apply to situations where we're dealing with people who are outside the bounds of war (as the government contends with the Guantanamo detainees) is not an argument that the founders would have supported, because when they were faced with a similar situation they still played ball with international law."
Trinh submitted Awad's writ of habeas corpus in December 2005, shortly before the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act, which closed off the access to habeas corpus for Guantanamo captives.[1] It took over six months for Trinh to get permission to travel to Guantanamo.
Trinh arrived two days after the deaths of three hunger strikers that the DoD attributes to suicide.[1] He was only allowed one day of access to Awad before the camp commandant ordered all non-military personnel be expelled.
Trinh had been allowed to meet with Awad on two other occasions in the year following his first visit.[1]
Trinh described the negative effect on building attorney-client trust when his meetings with his client are videotaped, mail is intercepted, and he is not allowed to answer questions on topics like current events, the state of the war.[1]
"When (Adham) asks me a direct question, he knows I know the answer but I have to tell him I can't tell you. Such a situation hardly helps to build a trust relationship between attorney and client."
Colleagues from Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe represent another Yemeni named Zachariah al Baidany.[1]
