Monday, December 08, 2003

Chicago Tribune | Study: Terror-Related Cases Often Fizzle:
"The Justice Department has sharply increased prosecution of terrorism-related cases since the Sept. 11 attacks but many fizzled and few produced significant prison time, a new study finds."

About 6,400 people were referred by investigators for criminal charges involving terror in the two years after the attacks, but fewer than one-third actually were charged and only 879 were convicted, according to government records reviewed by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

The median prison sentence was just 14 days, said the study by clearinghouse co-directors David Burnham and Susan P. Long, lealeased Sunday. Only five people were sentenced to 20 years or more.

Critics seized on the numbers to question whether Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top law enforcement officials have been overstating the success of their anti-terrorism efforts. Nearly every time Ashcroft talks about the subject, he reads a long list of statistics on arrests and convictions to buttress his contention that great progress is being made.

Sen. Charles Grassley, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee with oversight of the FBI and Justice Department, said the report "raises questions about the accuracy of the department's claims about terrorism enforcement."

"This report shows that despite the focus on terrorism-related crimes, most of the people accused of terrorism involvement are getting little jail time, if at all," said Grassley, R-Iowa.…

In other words, for every would-be "shoe bomber" such as Richard Reid -- serving a life sentence for trying to light an explosive on a Paris-to-Miami flight last year -- there are many more suspects such as the group of Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, N.Y., who were convicted of supporting terrorism by briefly attending al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan.

"This administration's strategy of preventing terrorism has helped protect American for over two years," Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said.

According to the study, about 874 cases were pending as of Sept. 30, including some that might produce longer sentences. In October, for example, two members of an Oregon group were sentenced to 18 years each in prison for attempting to travel to Afghanistan and fight U.S. forces there.

Still, critics of Justice Department anti-terrorism policies say the study lifts the veil on what they consider large-scale government deception aimed at reassuring an American public fearful of more attacks.

"This punches a huge hole in the hype the Justice Department has been engaged in," said Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "They are calling people terrorists, on a massive scale, who aren't terrorists."

According to the study, charges were filed against 2,001 of the 6,400 people recommended for prosecution since the attacks. Authorities declined to prosecute 1,554. Some 2,845 of the referrals were pending as of Sept. 30.

Of the 879 people convicted, 373 went to prison and 506 did not. Of those sentenced to prison, 250 got less than a year, 100 got less than five years and just 23 were sentenced to five years or more.

During the two years before Sept. 11, 2001, 24 people were sentenced to five or more years in prison on comparable terror-related offenses, the study said.

The study also found that:

* Prosecutions of individuals suspected of ties to one category, international terrorism, jumped from 142 in the two years before Sept. 11, 2001, to 748 in the two years after. Yet only three people in that category since the attacks have drawn sentences of five years or more, compared with six during the earlier period.

* More than 260 people convicted since Sept. 11 of terrorism-related offenses were sentenced to the time that had already spent in jail awaiting disposition of their case.

* About 35 percent of criminal referrals made by investigators were declined by prosecutors because of lack of evidence or no obvious federal crime had been committed.

TRAC report: http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/terrorism/report031208.html

Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-terrorism-prosecutions,1,7624659.story

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