Terror Sentences Brief, Study Finds

A new study of Justice Department terrorism prosecutions since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks shows that while the government has convicted 184 people of crimes deemed to be “international terrorism,” defendants were sentenced to a median prison term of just 14 days -- and in some cases received no jail time at all.

This is among the conclusions of a study, released Sunday, by researchers at Syracuse University who examined government terrorism prosecution data.

In its two-year war on terrorism, the Justice Department has trumpeted a number of high-profile convictions and lengthy prison terms won against alleged terrorist sympathizers and supporters in federal courtrooms.

But the study found that, in the most serious cases, sentences are actually shorter. The number of defendants sentenced to five years or more for terrorism-related crimes declined in the two years after the attacks compared with the two years before them, the authors found.

“It raises questions about how the government is targeting its investigative work in this area,” said David Burnham, a former newspaper reporter who works with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the data-gathering firm affiliated with Syracuse that conducted the study.

“Clearly, terrorism enforcement is a very serious business. There are people in the world who really want to do us harm,” he said. “It is also essential that the government work as smartly and as effectively as possible.”

In a statement, an FBI spokeswoman, Cassandra Chandler, called the report “misleading,” saying it ignored the fact that a growing number of referrals to prosecutors relate to intelligence gathered about terrorist threats, which are not necessarily likely to result in immediate prosecution.

The conclusions reflect how the Justice Department, under Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, has adopted an aggressive and expansive view of what constitutes potential terrorist activity in the aftermath of the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks.

Over the last two years, for instance, the government has begun to include in anti-terrorism data hundreds of immigration cases, where offenders often end up receiving probation or sentences that amount to only the time they were incarcerated awaiting a hearing or trial.

The department has been previously criticized for its number-crunching. Last January, the General Accounting Office, the auditing arm of Congress, found that Justice officials had misclassified scores of cases as terrorism-related in annual performance reports to Congress. Some people have suggested the department has been trying to inflate its anti-terrorism numbers to win added funding and support in Congress.

To its critics, the study is further evidence that the department is exaggerating the success of its anti-terrorism efforts, and raises questions about its strategy of casting a wide net.

“Since Sept. 11, we’ve been told that stopping terrorists has been the top priority of the Justice Department,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a prepared statement. “If the data in the report is correct, this raises questions about the accuracy of the department’s claims about terrorism enforcement.”

“It is the clearest proof that they are not catching the big-time terrorists,” asserted the American Civil Liberties Union, which has accused the department of unfairly targeting immigrants and prosecuting them for relatively minor crimes.

Justice officials said the authors failed to appreciate the reality of post-Sept. 11 law enforcement. The study “ignores the value of early disruption of potential terrorist acts by proactive prosecution of terrorism-related targets on less serious charges,” Mark Corallo, a Justice spokesman, said in a prepared statement. “This strategy has proven to be an effective method of deterring and disrupting potential terrorist acts.”

The authors acknowledged some shortcomings in the study. Over half of the terrorism-related cases that federal agents referred to U.S. attorneys for possible prosecution since Sept. 11, 2001, had not been acted upon or were still pending as of this Sept. 30, the study’s cutoff date.

Some of the most serious charges, the authors said, may still be working their way through the criminal justice process; their resolution will likely increase the total number of people who receive lengthy sentences, they conceded.

Just last week, a federal judge in Buffalo had sentenced Mukhtar al-Bakri to 10 years in prison on a charge of providing material support to the Al Qaeda terrorist organization. Al-Bakri was among a group of defendants known as the “Lackawanna Six” charged in connection with their attendance at an Al Qaeda-affiliated training camp in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Of more than 6,400 criminal terrorism-related referrals after Sept. 11, the U.S. filed charges in 2,001 cases, so far winning 879 convictions, the study found. Among those convicted, 506 received no prison time.

Of the 373 who were sentenced to prison, 123 received sentences of at least one year, including 18 who received sentences of five to 20 years, and five defendants who were sentenced to 20 years to life.

The 879 convictions included 184 involving “international terrorism.” Eighty of these defendants received no jail time, 91 were sentenced to a year or less, and 10 got sentences of one to five years. Only three were sentenced to more than five years.