SAN FRANCISCO, March 12 (Reuters) - An appeals court
on Monday overturned the 22-year prison term of the "Millennium
Bomber," saying it was too lenient, and sent the case back to a
lower court for re-sentencing.
Ahmed Ressam was arrested in connection with a
plot to detonate explosives at Los Angeles International Airport
in 1999 and sentenced to a 22-year prison term plus five years
of supervised release. But prosecutors appealed the sentence,
imposed by a Seattle-based federal judge, as too lenient.
A split 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the sentence on Monday, the latest turn in a
case that has been litigated for years. The appeals court voted
7-4 that Ressam's prison term was much shorter than that called
for by U.S. sentencing guidelines.
The ruling largely upholds an earlier opinion by a
three-judge 9th Circuit panel in 2010.
Ressam's attorney, Thomas Hillier, said the latest ruling is
a slight improvement compared to the one from 2010, which had
removed the original sentencing judge, who has now been returned
to the case.
The judge, U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, had
written newspaper opinion pieces to argue that the federal
courts were the appropriate place to try accused terrorists, as
opposed to military tribunals.
Ressam has been incarcerated since his arrest in 1999,
Hillier said.
"The majority believes the sentence was too low and the
majority rules," Hillier said.
Ressam, trained in terrorist camps in Afghanistan, had
planned an attack for Dec. 31, 1999, according to the opinion.
But he was apprehended shortly beforehand while crossing the
border from Canada into the United States, and a jury convicted
him in 2001.
He later reached a deal with U.S. federal prosecutors to
give information about other terrorism suspects in return for a
shorter sentence. But Ressam angered prosecutors by refusing to
cooperate further after early 2003.
Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's office
in Seattle, said prosecutors "will seek to hold Mr. Ressam fully
accountable for his attempt to murder scores of innocent people
by bombing the Los Angeles airport."
The explosives found in Ressam's possession were capable of
producing a blast 40 times greater than that of a devastating
car bomb, 9th Circuit Judge Richard Clifton wrote in the
opinion.
"The crimes that Ressam sought to commit were horrific,"
Clifton wrote. "The most important reason for our conclusion
that the sentence imposed by the district court was
substantively unreasonable is that the sentence did not properly
account for those crimes."
In dissent, Judge Mary Schroeder wrote that it was
reasonable for the district court to credit Ressam's
cooperation.
"Although the end of Ressam's cooperation burdened the
government's ability to pursue several criminal prosecutions,"
Schroeder wrote, "he provided a wealth of information otherwise
not susceptible to later recantation or retraction."
Ressam is currently serving his sentence at the "Supermax"
federal prison in Florence, Colorado, according to the Federal
Bureau of Prisons.
The case in the 9th Circuit is United States of America v.
Ahmed Ressam, 09-30000.
For the USA: Mark Bartlett and Helen Brunner of the U.S.
Attorney's Office.
For Ressam: Thomas Hillier II of the Federal Public
Defender's Office.
(Reporting by Dan Levine; additional reporting by Jonathan
Stempel)
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