Lawyers for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, released on Friday after 30 years in a U.S. prison, said the conditions of his parole are unreasonable and illegal and should be vacated by a federal court.
The former U.S. Navy analyst left a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, about 45 miles north of Raleigh, early Friday morning, said Edmond Ross, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
According to Pollard’s lawyers, he will be required to wear an electronic bracelet so his movements can be monitored at all times. Also, his computers and those of any employer who hires him will be subjected to “unfettered monitoring and inspection.”
The lawyers called the conditions “onerous and oppressive” in a statement announcing their legal challenge in a federal court in New York on Friday.
“There is no basis whatsoever to treat Mr. Pollard in that manner, and doing so is vindictive and cruel, as well as unlawful,” lawyers Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman said.
His lawyers filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court in New York against the U.S. Parole Commission and the U.S. Probation Office for the Southern District of New York. The petition claims that “unlawful parole conditions were imposed by the Parole Commission.”
Pollard’s case has strained relations between Israel and the United States, two close allies.
He was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted in 1987 of passing reams of classified information to Israel. Now 61, Pollard has said he wants to emigrate to Israel, where his second wife lives and where he can expect to receive substantial Israeli government back pay.
“The people of Israel welcome the release of Jonathan Pollard,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. “After three long and difficult decades, Jonathan has been reunited with his family.”
Pollard, a Jewish-American, was granted Israeli citizenship while in prison. Under the terms of his parole, he must remain in the United States for five years.
Netanyahu has instructed Israelis to stay low key about Pollard’s release because of concerns that too warm a celebration might damage efforts to persuade the U.S. government to let him leave for Israel sooner.
Successive U.S. administrations had resisted Israeli calls to show the unrepentant Pollard clemency, though Washington did, at times, mull an early release as part of its efforts to revive talks on Palestinian statehood in Israel-occupied territories.
Pollard’s legal team has called on U.S. President Barack Obama to allow him to go to Israel immediately after his release, while noting that he has a job and a place to live in the United States.
A U.S. official said Obama did not have any plans to alter the terms of his parole to allow Pollard leave the United States.
(Additional reporting by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Jeffrey Benkoe)
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