By Andrew Kreig / Project Director

A distinguished European human rights advocate is relentlessly exposing abuses by mainstream Swedish news organizations covering the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Dr. Marcello Ferrada de Noli is a medical school professor who splits his time between Sweden and Italy after surviving politically motivated torture decades ago in his native Chile. His recent columns show how Sweden’s major broadcasters and newspapers support their government’s campaign against Assange, most recently by a state-owned television documentary that blames the defendant, in effect, for shaming the nation’s legal system.

Ferrada-Noli, right, argues that massive irregularities by Swedish authorities and structural flaws within the nation’s legal system are the true cause of the global scrutiny of Sweden for due process violations in the heavy-handed Swedish investigation of Assange for potential rape charges under an expansive legal definition. Several of Ferrada-Noli’s latest columns examine the motives and sensationalistic tactics of state-owned Swedish National Television in its recent documentary. Similarly, he published April 18 a column concluding that a "scoop" last month by the country's right-wing tabloid Expessen was to obscure the close working relationship between it and authorities prosecuting Assange. Overall, the professor characterizes the news coverage as anti-Assange and pro-prosecution despite the broadcasters’ ostensible professional neutrality. Meanwhile, cables released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks are creating worldwide headlines as the week begins. The cables show that the United States has been secretly funding anti-government efforts in Syria for years, helping threaten the current government.

Our Justice Integrity Project has cooperated with the professor's efforts by sharing our columns, and he cites our work at the top of his April 18 column. Like others, however, our Project focuses upon the due process and other such fairness considerations in the Assange case, and not on the largely extra-legal considerations as his general character and work. For these reasons, we report today on the new book Inside WikiLeaks by Assange’s former close advisor Daniel Domschelt-Berg, which alleges a number of serious flaws by Assange that led to their break.

By Andrew Kreig / Project Director

The Conspirator, which opened April 15, is Robert Redford’s compelling Civil War-era drama about Mary Surratt, the first woman federally executed in the United States. The film raises sharp questions over the defendant's guilt in President Lincoln's assassination -- and, by implication, our own era's legal procedures for suspected terrorists.

Unraveling the real story about the movie and the trial led me to exclusive interviews with historian Kate Clifford Larson, Ph.D., and longtime Washington public affairs commentator John Edward Hurley. The two experts differ sharply on Surratt's guilt, leading to further intriguing questions about legal procedures, politics and news coverage today.

Redford directed the movie, which portrays high-level federal authorities railroading Washington resident Mary Surratt to the scaffold on dubious charges of conspiracy. Assassin John Wilkes Booth, her son and other Confederate sympathizers had used her boarding house and nearby locales to plot the death of Lincoln, the vice president and secretary of state. "I am a Southerner and a devoted mother," she says in the film, "but no assassin."  Her defense attorney, who had been a Union war-hero, gave up the practice of law in disgust after her death, and became the Washington Post's first city editor.

The movie’s historical accuracy is creating a dispute far broader than Surratt’s fate. The film suggests that authorities suppressed evidence for fear that a long proceeding might encourage rebels. That kind of result-oriented justice system is a rebuke to authorities and civil rights watchdog institutions of any era, including our own.