October 5, 2007 (AP) An appeals court ruling in the case of would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam could "significantly diminish" the government's ability to prosecute terrorists, the Justice Department wrote Thursday in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case.
Ressam, an Algerian national, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2005 after being convicted on nine counts for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport around January 1, 2000. Customs agents in Port Angeles caught him with explosives in the trunk of his rental car when he drove off a ferry from British Columbia in December 1999. The ensuing scare prompted the cancellation of New Year's celebrations at Seattle's Space Needle.
Early this year, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Ressam's conviction on one of the charges — carrying explosives during the commission of a felony, which carries a mandatory 10-year sentence. In a 2-1 decision, the court reasoned that the law required prosecutors to show the explosives were carried "in relation to" the felony, which in this case was lying on a Customs form.
The panel sent the case back to a lower court to issue a new sentence, and also asked the judge to explain the rationale behind the 22-year term, which prosecutors had challenged as too lenient.
The Justice Department disagreed with the dismissal of the charge and asked the 9th Circuit to hear the case again with 15 judges. The court declined, prompting Thursday's petition to the Supreme Court.
"The Court of Appeals has misconstrued (the law) in a way that conflicts with the decisions of other courts of appeals and could significantly diminish the statute's usefulness as a tool for combating terrorism-related offenses," the petition said. "Nothing in the text ... indicates that the explosives must have been carried 'in relation to' the underlying felony."
If allowed to stand, the Justice Department argued, the lower court's ruling is likely to be particularly significant in terrorism cases where a defendant is caught before a plan is put into action. In such cases, including Ressam's, it could be difficult or impossible to prove the connection between carrying the explosives and other felonies committed by the defendant.
Ressam's attorneys insist that the government's interpretation would lead to a nonsensical result: The law would punish the coincidental possession of explosives during a felony as harshly as the actual use of explosives during another felony.
"Congressional intent to impose such a harsh sentence would not be served by making it available simply because explosives are being carried at the time a wholly unrelated, nonviolent felony is committed," they wrote in their trial brief.
Ressam was convicted in 2001, then decided to tell investigators what he knew about al-Qaida in an effort to win a shorter sentence. His testimony helped convict one of his coconspirators, but his cooperation came to a halt by early 2003, forcing the government to dismiss cases against two of his alleged coconspirators, Samir Ait Mohamed and Abu Doha.