D.C. Circuit Dismisses Mohammed Appeal

Today the D.C. Circuit granted the government's motion to dismiss as moot Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed's Guantanamo habeas merits appeal. The government had appealed Judge Gladys Kessler's grant of Mohammed's habeas petition. However, the government soon requested that the merits appeal be held in abeyance, apparently because it had decided instead to transfer Mohammed to his home country, Algeria. Mohammed opposed any such transfer because, he claimed, he feared being tortured. The question of the transfer to Algeria eventually came to form the basis of a certiorari petition filed November 5, 2010 and still pending at the Supreme Court. In his petition, Mohammed asked the Court to review whether a district court may or must give "conclusive effect to the government's assertion that the individual is unlikely to be tortured if transferred to a particular country." In January of this year, however, the government announced that Mohammed had been transferred to Algeria; on the same day that DoD announced the transfer, government counsel also filed for a dismissal of the D.C. Circuit case. And now that the D.C. Circuit motion has been resolved, it is no surprise that today the government also asked the Supreme Court to dismiss Mohammed's cert. petition altogether. The petitioner then asked the Supreme Court to dismiss its petitioner altogether. We will post any updates as they become available. UPDATE: Corrected post to reflect that the petitioner, not the government, filed the Rule 46 dismissal motion in the Supreme Court, and to include a link to that motion.