Qaeda Ruling Could Spur Leniency
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The nine-month prison sentence recently handed down at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp to an Australian who served Al Qaeda could sway federal judges on the mainland toward leniency in terrorism-related cases, an expert in sentencing says.
The first case to test this possibility will be called today in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where a Brooklyn man who owns an Islamic bookstore faces sentencing for plotting to send money overseas to jihadists in Chechnya and Afghanistan.
Abdulrahman Farhane likely faces about 13 years in prison, according to the federal guidelines. Lawyers for Farhane are saying the sentence the Australian, David Hicks, received is the appropriate sentence for him as well.
“It would be disproportionate for the Court to sentence Mr. Farhane (who discussed transferring money overseas and lied about the fact) to a term of imprisonment greater than Mr. Hicks … who left his native Australia to wage Jihad,” a lawyer for Farhane, Michael Hueston, wrote recently to the judge, Loretta Preska.
While the military commission system that handled the Hicks case is separate from the federal court system, there is some basis in federal law for Farhane’s sentencing judge to consider the outcome of Hicks’s case, an expert in sentencing law at Ohio State University, Douglas Berman, said.
“A judge has an obligation under the guiding sentencing statute … to avoid unwarranted sentencing disparities,” Mr. Berman said. “A good defense attorney will say that a judge should appreciate that Hicks’s outcome is not only relevant, but integrally important.”
Alternatively, Judge Preska could decide that the system in Guantanamo should not affect the outcome of cases in her courtroom.
“The Hicks case is a benchmark for how bad that system is, but it is not a benchmark for what sentences should be,” a lawyer who specializes in executive detention cases, Aziz Huq of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said.
Farhane, 52, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest last year. A naturalized citizen from Morocco, Farhane has asked Judge Preska for leniency on several grounds other than Hicks’s sentence. He cites his poor health and the well-being of his six children.
