Luis Kutner


Luis Kutner was a US human rights activist, FBI informant, and lawyer who was on the National Advisory Council of the US branch of Amnesty International during its early years and created the concept of a living will. He was also notable for his advocacy of "world habeas corpus", the development of an international writ of habeas corpus to protect individual human rights. He was a founder of World Habeas Corpus, an organization created to fight for international policies which would protect individuals against unwarranted imprisonment. Kutner's papers are at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University.

Biography

Luis Kutner was born in Chicago to Jewish-Russian immigrants. At the age of 15, he entered the law school of the University of Chicago.
During the late 1940s, Kutner built up his reputation as a human rights lawyer.
During his career he also gained the release of over 1,000 people, mainly as they were wrongfully convicted or being held without charge.
Kutner gained national recognition in 1949, when he obtained freedom for a black mechanic from Waukegan, Illinois, James Montgomery, who had served 26 years of a life term sentence for raping an itinerant. A Federal judge described as "a sham" the defendant's 1924 trial in which a vengeful prosecutor withheld vital evidence. He also helped free Hungarian Cardinal József Mindszenty, American fascist poet Ezra Pound, former Congo President Moise Tshombe and represented the Dalai Lama and Tibet. Kutner is widely known as one of the most prominent human-rights attorneys of the twentieth century.
He is also accredited for the first acknowledged federal lawsuit against a prison warden by inmates in 1949. In 1952, Kutner filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Black passenger against Illinois Greyhound Lines, four years prior to the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle.
In 1966, Kutner participated in a lawsuit against George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party.

Intelligence service

Declassified records show that Kutner had a history of collusion with the FBI and the CIA. In 1969, he reported Fred Hampton to the FBI in the days leading to Hampton's death at the hands of the Chicago Police. In 1973, he petitioned the CIA for $250k to set up an NGO in Beijing, in return letting the agency "staff it completely with our own people."

Biographical Chronology

1927 J.D., University of Chicago Law School

1930 Admitted to Bar, State of Illinois

1944 Author, The Admiral

1948 Author, Fights and Cascades, Moon Splashed, Red Wine and Shadows

1953 Author, Live in Twelve Minutes

1957 Author, The International Court of Habeas Corpus and the United Nations Writ of Habeas Corpus

1958 Author, World Habeas Corpus: A Proposal for International Court of Habeas Corpus and the United Nations Writ of Habeas Corpus

1961 Co-founded Amnesty International

1962 Author, World Habeas Corpus

1966 Author, I, the Lawyer

1967 Wrote the first living will

1970 Author, Legal Aspects of Charitable Trusts and Foundations: A Guide for Philanthropoids, The Intelligent Women's Guide to Future Security, also published as How to Be a Wise Widow

1970 Editor, The Human Right to Individual Freedom: A Symposium on World Habeas to Corpus

1972 U.S. congressional nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize

1974 Author, Due Process of Rebellion, How to Be a Wise Widow, and ''The Trialle of William Shakespeare''

Author of living will

Luis Kutner was the first to publish the concept of the living will in 1969. The term living will means that this form of will was to be used while an individual was still alive. The term first occurs in the Luis Kutner Papers in a letter of November 15, 1967, in the context of Kutner’s correspondence with the Euthanasia Society of America. Kutner had first addressed the Euthanasia Society in August 1967 in connection with his plans to prepare an international symposium on Euthanasia which however was never materialized. On December 7, 1967, Kutner hold a speech on “Euthanasia and Due Process of Law” at the Euthanasia Society’s Annual Meeting in New York City. By that time, Kutner’s paper “Due Process of Euthanasia: The Living Will, A Proposal” was ready to be published, but publication was delayed until summer 1969 due to difficulties to find a publisher. In this paper, Kutner showed some sympathy with the propagators of “death on request”, but stressed that a living will “authorizing mercy killing” would be “contrary to public policy”. Subsequently, Kutner published four more articles about the topic, in which he followed the same line of argumentation. For example, in 1987 he wrote in the University of Detroit Law Review: “The Living Will is a means for the individual to manage his death by protective guidelines and is premised on the informed consent of the person prior to an irreversible coma or a state of being disabled or maimed. It is based on the right of privacy – the individual’s right to self-determination of his body”. The Euthanasia Society of America adopted Kutner's idea and devised a living will document which was distributed among members by the affiliate charity society Euthanasia Educational Fund. Kutner probably never became a member of the Euthanasia Society of America or one of its successor organisations, and his later attempts to cooperate with them failed.