Mari Newman is an activist, mother and warrior. You need to be when you’re a gay, Jewish, left-wing attorney going into Cuba’s Guantanamo prison in the mid-2000s to defend Muslim men accused of taking part in 9/11. For half a decade, they’d been held by the U.S. government without legal rights or judicial review. A small group of American attorneys, including Newman, volunteered to go to Gitmo at their law firms’ expense and represent the men pro bono.
What was happening involved carrying out the systematic torture of prisoners, sexual and otherwise, in ways she won’t talk about more than fifteen years later. She did all she could to help the incarcerated men — from formal legal work to bringing in Middle Eastern food and other client favorites, like baba ganoush, Flamin' Hot Cheetos and frozen cream puffs.
“I wanted to create change,” she says, “and I felt I could do it more effectively in the United States. I didn’t want to be that American woman going around another country telling people what to do, without the cultural literacy to understand the bigger picture. The law felt like the right tool to accomplish my goals here at home.” Courtesy of Mari Newman
Decades later, Newman would give the same talk to a tormented young woman who’d recently failed to pass the Colorado bar. Newman flew to Yemen, her clients’ homeland, to get to know their relatives; the meetings were heart-wrenching. The sister of one client was so grateful for her work that she gave Newman a dress from her closet as a thank-you gift. Younger siblings and cousins sat on her lap and laughed at her efforts to speak to them in Arabic. By now, Newman had a child of her own; while she worked in Yemen, her partner finished potty-training their daughter.
For more than a decade, Newman and her team returned to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base over and over again to meet with their clients. They read briefs, filed motions and sifted through the limited classified documents they were allowed to read in a “secure” facility outside of Washington, D.C. And they learned of the “Black Sites” around the world where the U.S. was using more extreme forms of torture.
As with many of her other cases, though, Newman was working for more than money. She and the rest of the legal team had not only proved that Booker died because of a chokehold and the use of a stun gun; they also uncovered evidence that Denver sheriffs had deleted surveillance video and even destroyed the taser that had contributed to his death.