Al-Arian Lawyers Brace for New Contempt Charge

Lawyers for a former Florida college professor in jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury in Virginia are bracing for a new criminal contempt charge against their client, Sami Al-Arian, after a Palestinian Arab activist in a similar predicament received a sentence of more than 11 years in prison.

"We're preparing for that eventuality," Al-Arian's lead attorney, Jonathan Turley, told The New York Sun yesterday.

Lawyers involved in the case said the likelihood of a new indictment of Al-Arian, who is now being held in civil contempt, increased last week after prosecutors obtained the 11-year sentence for another former professor, Abdelhaleem Ashqar.

"I think they're emboldened by it," an attorney who has consulted with Al-Arian's defense, Ashraf Nubani, said. "That sentence was brutal."

After a trial this year, a jury in Chicago acquitted Ashqar on a charge that he conspired to provide illegal aid to Hamas. However, the former Howard University professor was convicted of criminal contempt and obstruction of justice for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Hamas's ties in America. Ashqar, like Al-Arian, also spent time in jail for civil contempt.

While most defendants sentenced for failing to testify get no more than a few years in jail, Judge Amy St. Eve seemed to accept prosecutors' arguments that Ashqar deserved an unusually stiff sentence because of the terrorism-related crimes that were being investigated.

"It came as a big surprise," Mr. Nubani said. "For Palestinians who are activists, this is a clear retribution kind of thing."

A former prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, said the prospect of an extended jail term for Al-Arian could prompt the government to indict him. "I think you'd be tempted to do it," the ex-prosecutor said.

Defense lawyers complained that prosecutors who failed to convince juries that defendants were involved in terrorism are now asking judges to ignore those acquittals and impose lengthy prison sentences for ancillary crimes like obstruction and contempt. A spokesman for federal prosecutors in Virginia, James Rybicki, declined to comment for this article.

Al-Arian, a former computer engineering professor at the University of Florida, stood trial in 2005 on charges that he acted as the senior representative in America for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A jury acquitted him on eight counts and failed to reach a verdict on nine others. He later pled guilty to one count of aiding a terrorist organization and was sentenced to 57 months in jail. That sentence has been on hold for nearly a year while he has been jailed for civil contempt.

Al-Arian contends that the terms of his guilty plea preclude the government from forcing him to testify. One appeals court rejected that argument, but another is still considering it.