Padilla

The decision came out today and it's a bit of a let down. The general consensus seems to be that the Court punted once again. The Court decided that Padilla's attorney filed the writ of habeas in the wrong district and against the wrong person.
This means that Padilla gets to sit in jail without proper contact with his attorney until a new habeas petition is filed in the right district, which will be the district that the naval brig is in, and against the correct person, which is not Rumsfeld who ordered the detention and took Padilla into custody but the commander of the naval brig.
Prof Leiter posits that the Court may have made this decision in light of Hamdi. I haven't read it yet so I can't tell you. But the idea is that the Court handed the administration two defeats already today, Hamdi and Rasul. Now that the writing is on the wall they'll let the government do the right thing and charge Padilla so they don't have to further sully the President's handling of the war on terror.
I think this is an interesting idea, and after I read Hamdi I'll talk about it some more. What I wonder though is will the administration do this? The evidence that they've been willing to provide so far has been weak at best, the methods they used to get the evidence are the exact reasons the exclusionary rule was established. The administration would almost certainly lose any civilian trial. If they try to proceed in a military court that will create huge new issues and Rasul, which I also will read later, seemed to imply that Congress needed to pass a law to establish proper military tribunals.
The administration's cases rested solely on the President's powers during war and over all that argument seems to be rejected almost completely by the court. This may cause the administration to wake up and work with Congress, to stop being so secretive, but this doesn't seem likely to me.