Judge Lamberth Corrects His Error; the <em>New York Times</em> Repeats It

I have largely suspended my campaign of fact-checking New York Times editorials, but this one is too good to pass up. In his opinion the other day on counsel access issues at Guantanamo, Judge Royce Lamberth---as Wells noted---made a minor factual error. "It is a sad reality that in the ten years since the first detainees were brought to Guantanamo Bay not a single one has been fully tried or convicted of any crime," he wrote in the original version of his opinion. As Wells noted, this was not quite true:

This may be a strained and exceedingly delicate way of saying that thus far,  detainees facing prosecution have only a) pleaded guilty; b) pleaded guilty but not proceeded to sentencing; or c) been convicted, but not yet seen final appellate rulings. I doubt it, though, as the text has the feel of a lament about protracted legal limbo for detainees.  In that respect it seems to ignore folks like David Hicks, Ahmed Ghailani, Salim Hamdan, Majid Khan, and so on---all of whom have been prosecuted, and either admitted guilt or been tried to verdict.

Judge Lamberth, to his credit, immediately corrected his error---issuing an order changing the language to read "only a handful have been tried or convicted." He also issued an amended version of the ruling. The error appears to have been brought to his attention by the New York Times's own Charlie Savage. As Ritika summarized yesterday:

Judge Lamberth corrected the opinion immediately after Wells noted an error in it in his post yesterday—but apparently, the correction did not occur because Judge Lamberth had been scanning Lawfare (although we certainly hope he has been reading it). In response to Ben’s Twitter suggestion that the court may have been responding to Wells’s post, the Times‘s Charlie Savage tweeted this morning, “I think, actually, it was bc I called his chambers & asked a clerk about it when I read that line.” Yeah, that’s probably it.

The Times's editorial writers appear to have missed the correction the paper's own reporter prompted. Here's how its editorial on the opinion concludes:

A decade after the first prisoners were taken to Guantánamo, “not a single one has been fully tried or convicted of any crime,” Judge Lamberth wrote. He is completely right in his insistence that the administration respect the rule of law.

Let's see how long the Times take to correct their quotation of a factually-incorrect sentence that has been specifically removed from the opinion in question. Sigh. UPDATE: Nearly four hours have gone by and no correction. Tick. Tick. Tick. . . . UPDATE 10:45 pm: The editorial has been corrected. The end now reads:

A decade after the first prisoners were taken to Guantánamo, “only a handful have been tried or convicted,” Judge Lamberth wrote. He is completely right in his insistence that the administration respect the rule of law.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: September 8, 2012 An earlier version of this editorial contained a quotation from the federal district court opinion that was subsequently revised. Judge Lamberth changed “not a single one has been fully tried or convicted of any crime” to “only a handful have been tried or convicted.”