Sunday, April 01, 2007
Justice Firebrand. From the December issue of the magazine, a short profile of Moira Feeney and SF's Center for Justice & Accountability, which aims to put a hurting on international torturers (pdf file).
For Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, the day of reckoning was long overdue. The former Haitian death-squad leader—allegedly responsible for more than 5,000 deaths—had spent the last decade in comfortable exile in New York, but this August a couple of his victims finally got to have their say. In a packed federal civil court, two Haitian women recounted how Constant’s thugs gang-raped them in the 1990s. The judge ruled against Constant; “the devil,” as his countrymen called him, was no longer untouchable.
That the women had the chance to tell their stories in court was largely due to 31-year-old Hastings alum Moira Feeney, lead attorney on the case. Feeney works for San Francisco’s Center for Justice & Accountability, which has brought more human-rights abusers who’ve evaded punishment—from Chilean assassins to Somali generals—to heel in civil court than any other group. The center often wins multimillion dollar judgments against defendants. While collecting can be tough, “ultimately, it’s not about the money,” Feeney says. “Our clients had their day in court—that’s the goal.”
That the women had the chance to tell their stories in court was largely due to 31-year-old Hastings alum Moira Feeney, lead attorney on the case. Feeney works for San Francisco’s Center for Justice & Accountability, which has brought more human-rights abusers who’ve evaded punishment—from Chilean assassins to Somali generals—to heel in civil court than any other group. The center often wins multimillion dollar judgments against defendants. While collecting can be tough, “ultimately, it’s not about the money,” Feeney says. “Our clients had their day in court—that’s the goal.”
